I’m looking forward to reading Bill Tancer’s book Click which is supposed to show how analyzing massive amounts of click data, correlated with other data, can tell us what consumers want and predict the economic future. Of course hype sells and this book may have its share. But my guess is, he’s right. Hitwise, the company he works at, has complete records of browsing and search behavior for 10 million consumers. I’m sure that’s a gold mine. But expand the size of that, make sure its representative of the population, and add other data to it that could be available on what people do offline (more on this in another post) and you’ve hit the motherlode of data. With that much data and today’s computer prowess, one can mine a helluva lot of nuggets of wisdom. More when I actually read the book.