Truthiness of data in composite services
February 11th, 2006 by jiri
Nicholas Carr: The truthiness of Web 2.0
“Zillow’s flaw exposes a deeper problem with the Web 2.0 mashup model. Entrepreneurs are launching all sorts of sites and services that are built on data that they’re siphoning out of third-party sites and databases. Sometimes, the secondhand data is good; sometimes, it’s not. The process of chopping up and bundling data from many different sources can, moreover, amplify inaccuracies. Combine bad data from two different sources and you may get bad data squared. Unfortunately, to the user, the inaccuracies are invisible.