The Data-Mining Blog is a great, frequently-updated blog devoted to the new ways that people, governments, scientists and corporations are extracting more information out of the data-clouds we leave in our wake. It's enough to make you paranoid.
When Bruce Schneier talked at my speaker series earlier this year, he characterized personal information as a kind of pollution, easy to create, hard to destroy and potentially very dangerous.
Our approach to personal information reminds me of the days when we dumped our trash in the sea. "The sea is so big, our trash is so small, we'll never make a dent in its depths." Or our present view of greenhouse gasses, for that matter. We offgas all this personal data and the instruments capable of turning it against us grow ever-more sensitive.
Round Trip To Google
If you publish a blog and subscribe to Google's blog alerting, you can – by using the real time option for altering – get an idea of how long it takes Google to get each post.
- I posted Weekends At The Movies at 5:18 AM on December the first. The alert from Google came at 3:48 PM, a delay of 10 hours and 30 minutes.
- Now With More Matterhorn was published at 7:25 PM on November the 30th, the alert arrived at 2:32 AM on December 1st, a delay of 7 hours 7 minutes.
These figures suggest a substantial round trip time for blog publishing, indexing and alerting. Given that Technorati claims to have a mean time to index of 5 minutes (something which I personally doubt) Google seems to be pretty slow. Of course, I've only looked at 2 data points from a single blog. Perhaps there are other bloggers out there who can also share their stats on this one.
Update: This post was published at 9:23 AM on the December 2nd, the alert from Google was time stamped 3:22 AM on December 3rd – a minute shy of 18 hours.
(via Fimolculous)
