A new breed of data is born

People who deal with Internet stats on a daily basis should be realizing by now they need to find out ways of squeezing the juice out of all the tag-related qualitative data all over the web.

Sure quantitative data is ok, but when it’s about how people feel about your brand and service, corporate executives are always on their toes. We’re talking about very important qualitative data here.

Folksonomy shows no signs of slowing down, and people’s behavior has changed. They are tagging as they surf the web, just tagging along the way. And amazing things happen when a lot of people tag the same Internet content. You get the “collective perception” of things, which is a form of “collective intelligence”.

It’s time to pick up those Sociology, Psychology and Linguistics books and experiment with this brave new world of “organic data”. So don’t be shy, release the Internet shrink in you!

Here are some great examples of fun ways to play with this qualitative data:

- Top 10 tags for www.mtv.com on Delicious, saved 1558 times;
- 305 notes of people who have bothered to write about the MTV website in Delicious;
- Paste any text into Wordle and get beautiful visual tag clouds of whatever you want. Paste the presidencial candidates’ speeches for example, and compare the results side by side;
- But things can get even more interesting… like when you ask people to write the first word they think of when you show them a brand logo. Believe me, it’s kind of addictive. That’s what Brand Tags asks of you, and so far they’ve gathered 1.2M tags about brands. Just dive into their database and you’re in for a treat. Don’t miss out on Battle Mode, where two brands go mano a mano on a match for the user’s prefference. Here’s the current ranking.

The image above is a tag cloud generated by Wordle of this very post.