Hella Data Aggregation March 8, 2009

Watched the Watchmen tonight. As a big fan of the book, I thought that it was a good rendition of the original graphic novel. The friends I was watching it with probably did not have the same enthusiasm as I did though. I’m not sure that graphic novel should have ever been turned into a movie (at least the film was better than the proposed script, which had Ozymandias killed by night-owl’s batarang at the last moment).

Awesome.

Anyway, I’d like to explain why Ozymandias was so awesome (at least in the book). In particular, I want to discuss the part where he watches 100 screens at once at half-volume, to absorb the aggregate data at once. For those of you not familiar, he describes it here:

Burrough's Cut up Technique

He mentiones Burrough’s cut-up technique, which itself actually, is pretty facinating. American 20th century author William S. Burroughs cut up pages of a book and re-arranged the pieces, which he then read to get some sort of a subliminal meaning, in which he argued “the future could shine through”.

Ok. So it might sound like a stupid idea. But it is undeniable that if you aggregate many data sources at once and arange them in a useful manner, you can often see previously invisible patterns, and sometimes even catch a glimpse of where they go.

The internet provides us with an insurmountable ammount of data (mostly 4chan, I think), and it’d be great if we could aggregate that data somehow. Some of my favorite websites are Google Trends and TwitScoop, which both can say a lot about what’s on the mind of internet users.

Somtimes its just wierd.

Also, while I’m on the topic about data aggregation, take a look at Hans Rosling’s Ted Talk. Even you found what I said to be boring, you’ll find this speech pretty awesome. Keep the replies coming, and remember to bookmark this blog!