For Wikipedia Reality Mining “is the collection and analysis of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior, with the goal of identifying predictable patterns of behavior“. In a word it is an emerging science consisting of leveraging the unlimited data produced by machines around the world to analyze and understand society.

This is a gigantic business that is right around the corner, from predicting behaviors to feeling where the planet’s mind is going. And who better than google, with fingers on the pulse of the worlds questions (search), communications (gmail) and worries (news) to make business out of that? After the Flu Trends project comes another type of research: country reputation analysis.

An online survey has found that Korea is best known throughout the world for its leading conglomerates Samsung, LG and Hyundai, while its people are most known for their quick temper.

The Dong-A Ilbo commissioned the world’s leading search engine Google to conduct surveys on keywords that best represent 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and China, as well as their people […]

For the survey, Google Korea ran an automatic search Sunday evening on hundreds of billions of Web pages after typing in a series of questions in English on what a country or its people is known for.

Link

There will be an increasing number of possibilities and findings in that field, with only one limit: citizen’s privacy that is not really endanger by these large studies, but could be challenged by more localized and limited research.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 11:01 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.