Everyday we see more and more of daily lives are entering the digital realm. We’re communicating electronically, make electronica things, trade them, want them. And while doing so we leave little bits of information behind us, a digital cookie trail. So far the computer power and resources to analyze all that information was really, until now that is.

Thanks to “Moore’s Law”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law , not only do we have the power to analyze that kind of information but with the internet was also have the means to collect it.

But, what does this mean? Well, look at this paper, “Unraveling the Taste Fabric of Social Networks”:http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/01/22/unraveling_the_.html

bq. Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness—the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource would afford completely novel ways for representing and reasoning about web users and people in general.

Interesting huh? But I think we’re starting to reach the point described in “this Finacial Times article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c22f7fa4-891b-11da-94a6-0000779e2340.html

bq. So, in technology, Moore’s Law is alive and well. But technology does not operate in a vacuum. No business or government institution can change at 50 per cent a year. While stability and tradition are important, if a fundamental technology progresses far beyond society’s ability to absorb its impacts, a growing disconnection occurs. When, in the 19th century, technology proceeded at a rapid pace while social institutions did not, the results were upheavals and revolutions. Today, again, the key elements of the information economy are progressing at a scorching rate, while private and public institutions are lagging behind.

So wow do we deal with this new found ability to _reveal the structure of social connectedness_? Well, it’s probably still too early to address that question. Right now, we are only just exploring what is possible and so far the results are amazing. “Look at this”:http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/web_game_provides_breakthrough_in_predicting_spread_of_epidemics_9874 for example…

Using a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country. This model is considered a breakthrough in the field.

“We were confident that we could learn a lot from the data collected at the “www.wheresgeorge.com”:http://www.wheresgeorge.com bill-tracking website, but the results turned out far beyond our expectations,” said Lars Hufnagel

Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. They found that the human movements follow what are known as universal scaling laws (from local to regional to long-distance scales). Using the game data, they developed a powerful mathematical theory that describes the observed movements of travelers amazingly well over distances from just a few kilometers to a few thousand. The study represents a major breakthrough for the mathematical modeling of the spread of epidemics.

We are now starting to collect enough data to model really interesting ideas. With the help of our own personal digital cookie trail, who knows knows what we will be able to model next.