Anyone who knows me can attest to the claim that I am an organized person. Very organized. OCD organized. This may have something to do with my recent infatuation with data collection and organization. Considering all of the receptacles for information in our contemporary world, with social networking and SEO technology, there is a great deal of data, with exponentially more being produced each day. According to The Economist's recent article "The Data Deluge," humans will create 1200 exabytes (1 billion gigabytes=1 exabyte) of data this year. I am unable to fathom the amount of information that is, but I'm quite sure it's a lot.
I want to focus on the attempts to make sense of and organize information in a meaningful way. For a better explanation of what I'm getting at, just watch Hans Rosling's riveting TED Talk where he "Shows the best stats you've ever seen."
GOOD's Transparency department aims to organize information into evocative and beautifully designed diagrams, so the assembly of statistics into excel sheets and cliche pie charts becomes obsolete.
And the most lofty goal concerning data is none other than that of Google. Their mission statement boasts their attempt "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Not a single company, country or cause, but the world's information. That entire world. That's amazing and I want to have a part in it. Whether production of data, organization or (hopefully) synthesis, I want to be involved in this massive human experiment that has seemingly unimaginable implications.
