Web 2.0 and Beyond

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Chapter 4

Data on an Epic Scale

Increasingly … everyone in the world casts an ‘information shadow,’ an aura of data

which, when captured and processed intelligently, oers extraordinary opportunity

and mind-bending implications.

TIM O’REILLY AND JOHN BATTELLE 2009, 2

In the overview of Web 2.0 at the beginning of this book we explored Tim O’Reilly’s (2005b)

article, which introduced the idea of ‘data as the next Intel Inside’. Without revisiting the

detail here, the essence of the discussion was that a Web service’s database (under a Web as

Platform model) provides the critical functionality for a Web service in a similar way to a

computer’ ...