Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our behaviors more visible." What does that mean?

Here are some ideas. First, social-mediated search and discovery. What we look for and find is based on our behaviors.An article called vcmike.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/facebook... Facebook is the next Google gives the example of Sprout that "brands build and publish social advertising campaigns on Facebook (and other social networks)".

You (a company) find those who are interested in a cause rather than waiting for people to search for your cause. As the consumer identifies with a cause (interacting with a campaign) his/her behavior becomes evident. Marshall Clark offers a related perspective in a blog threeminds.organic.com/2009/06/docs_are_... post.

He says "Moving these same systems online that evaluate information and people in real life will deliver huge gains in the accuracy and trustworthiness of information and will help align Search with the increasingly social aspects of the Web. " s article spoke about the need to follow the creator of content (calls it PageRank for humans) rather than where that content is hosted. People are interested in following a particular writer wherever they publish.

If one can follow those who follow these writers, you get an idea of the followers behavior and thus able to present related content. That behavior would need to be made visible. Getting that visibility on "what you buy" is a service called Blippy (see http://www.gabbr.com/news/2009/12/2430/Want-Everyone-To-See-Your-Credit-Card-Transactions?-Of-Course-You-Do.-Meet-Blippy./ post) where everything you buy on your credit card is visible to your network.

Now we know what a disaster that was when Facebook tried it. But maybe Blippy has figured out a way for us to easily guard our behavior? The author points out that data mining of transactions we might consider private may be illegal (or at least unethical) but if we publish those transactions then companies should be free to mine them.

Back to your question ... the tweet you shared probably reflects some really deep (scary? ) thought.

Yes, I agree with the statement. There is huge growth potential in the behavior tracking industry. Specifically in the self-tracking end of the market.

There is a great website that I check in with now and then called the Quantified Self quantifiedself.com/ It is all about the latest in tracking your own behavior. There are logs out there where people can track anything they do and the programs spit out all kinds of information and correlations in a useful format. You can track everything from eating habits to hours of sleep per night to numbers of movies you watch to how many headaches you get....the possibilities are limitless.

Runners are using new self tracking devices by nike and others in their shoes to track their millage and their heart rate and other vital information. People are creating huge databases on themselves to learn their daily habits. Here is a great resource page listing all of the popular self tracking websites kk.org/quantifiedself/qs-resource-links.php If someone could get all this info onto a popular facebook type site where millions of people compare all kinds of info....the economic potential is unlimited.

People like to track all kinds of info almost obsessively, I actually was tracking everything I ate for a while on fitday.com It is a website that will crunch all your food info and tell you how many calories you consume and also nutrient content of all the food you eat, I learned I was deficient in calcium and magnesium and was getting too much sodium...pretty amazing stuff, this info could help people be more healthy it could help businesses find target audiences for their products. It really is the future of business. I encourage you to check out some of the sites on that list... Kind of interesting when you see a year of your life's behavior plotted out on a chart.

I was on on site that compared mood to other seemingly unrelated behavior. I learned that people who got less than 8 hours of sleep generally had worse moods than people who got a full 8+ really interesting correlations can be made. Someone just has to write the software or create an easy to use tracking device.

Maybe an ipod size device that you carry all day that monitors all kinds of info, you can enter in everything from food to driving millage to blood pressure while you are in traffic, whatever. I think this man is brilliant for recognizing this quickly growing sector.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.