Guardian Makes an Interesting Comparison
August 31, 2009
WolframAlpha, like business intelligence systems, make little sense to people like my father. Aged 86, my father has zero clue about obtaining from a search box the melting point of Inconel. Wolfram is not doing reverse public relations. The company is going to provide data feeds. There are quite a few data sets becoming available. Some are not so good: www.data.gov. Others are useful: www.fedstats.gov. A few are bait: www.compete.com. Some are misunderstood: www.twitter.com. What struck me was this sentence in “Wolfram Alpha to Open Data Feeds”:
Alpha is not a generalised search engine like Google that searches the web. Instead, much like the Guardian Data Store, Wolfram is curating data sets with financial, mathematical, scientific and other data that you can query using simple questions or that you can manipulate using mathematical formulae.
I would never have drawn a parallel between the Wolfram data and the newspaper writing about Alpha’s data. The embedded link is a nice touch as well. In this marketing blog, I shamelessly flog my books. I suppose it is a natural evolution of a newspaper to follow in the web prints of the addled goose. Everyone has to toot his or her own trumpet.
Stephen Arnold, August 31, 2009
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