Yesterday I noted how hard it is to find good statistics online and then said:
Which got me to thinking that the Internet could really use a database that takes in all kinds of statistical information, that anyone can write or possibly overwrite (Wikipedia style), is searchable, and in which the information can be easily displayed. Something that isn’t so silo’ed inside organizations, but rather is a place everyone can publish to when they have useful statistics. While text and audio and video have all moved to the Internet, statistics seem to be lagging behind.
C’mon Internet, I’ll give you 2 years. Hurry up and make it. A whole world is out there, needing better analysis.
Well, it didn’t take the Internet 2 years. A few hours after I made my post a new website called Swivel went public, which is similar to what I called for. Nicely played, Internet, nicely played.
See a discussion of Swivel here (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/05/swivel-to-launch-this-week-communitize-your-data/) and the website here (http://www.swivel.com). It still needs some good data to populate it, and could be refined a bunch, but it’s on the right track.
Hmm. What should I ask the Internet for next?
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