I think it's safe to say we live in a fairly data rich world. There's a whole hosepipe of data being created through the web to add to the filing cabinets of dusty debriefs in companies around the world. It gives us a great chance to better understand what people actually do. The trick will be to turn this hosepipe in to actionable understanding.
People in the social sciences are already doing this - here's a great simulation of the mood of America using twitter data.
We need to get good at this. Data visualization and statistical numeracy and storytelling will become key skills. But we can also turn them into interesting bits of communication - the Kleenex hayfever map and IBM's US Open pointstream are a couple of interesting examples.
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