Tell me something I didn’t know….. data mining on social networking

WorldNetDaily: Pentagon’s NSA sets sights on social-network websites

Interesting, reporting the past as breaking news. I’ve been following data mining since the early days of the net, as well as social networking. I guess I don’t see why this is considered news anymore. If dept stores can use data mining to determine store layouts, and have done so for years… I would sure hope that the NSA has been doing so for at least double that time frame.

Sure, massive audio based data mining is relatively new, in part due to cheap computer time, but we were doing such analysis on a small scale back in the 80’s. I must admit taking a day to process an hours worth of 96 bandwidth limited analog channels is a far cry from what can be done today… even on a desktop PC.

And data, not ads imho, is the future of web based revenue streams… well ok, it may well be an ad, but its not really the hope that someone will buy, but that someones characteristics can be analyzed.