by Raghu Ramakrishnan
Chief Scientist for Audience, Yahoo!
Here is another good research deck (pdf) I found on the topic of web data management, the evolution of online communities, hosted applications, and other lessons learned by the Chief Scientist for Audience @Yahoo and his team.
There is a cool trend in the cloud community to publish “web database communities” consisting of a searchable database driven by users who post the data content themselves.
Here are a couple of examples: http://www.photoenforced.com which is a database community site that publishes the locations of street intersections with cameras to photograph traffic violators. The street locations are entered by the users. So it is a self-supporting database driven community.
Another site is: http://www.GasPricesCentral.com which is certainly attractive in 2008 with skyrocketing fuel prices. Here, the users enter the date, vendor, type of gas, and most important price, of their latest fill-up. Again, the site consiste of self-supported content from the users themselves.
If this trend continues, the web will be flush with all sorts of interesting data stores.
By: Dean J. Garrett on July 20, 2008
at 8:01 pm