Give me a mass of data and I can usually slice and dice it into something meaningful.  It's what I do for a living.

That's probably why something resonated with me as I read Seth Godin's post about relationships between different behaviors.  He talks about how certain groups of people behave in similar ways, buy similar things, and have similar tastes.  Most of the time they're probably not even aware of it.

Here's something to chew on:  as people do more and more things online, their behavior patterns are going to grow more transparent.  Their activity history is already being collected by Google, and I have no doubt that MySpace is doing something similar by now.  What's scary is that most people have no idea this is happening, that they're being actively profiled as they use the Internet.

Now if you connect the dots between that and what Seth's post talks about, you come up with some interesting conclusions.  If I'm a member of a demographic that loves french cooking, Google probably knows that, and MySpace too.  I have no idea what demographic that is, but I'll bet Google does--in a way, Google knows more about me than I do.  In fact I'll bet Google has sliced and diced user search history in so many ways that they probably have a better understanding of human behavior than any other organization in the world.

I've never really thought about how valuable the insights are that these companies are acquiring right now.  If they have ways to group similar people (and I'm sure they do), they have the ability to tell you things about what you like that you probably don't know yourself, just based on the groups you fall into.  That's powerful.

One practice that's just becoming common recently (from what I've read, it might be more prevalent than I think) is the practice of politicians running detailed statistical analysis on areas where the vote is up in the air.  It's costly, so they don't do it everywhere, just in key areas where it could go one way or another.  Then they tailor their message in that area based on the demographics of the population.  Obviously (thankfully) politicians are very stuck in their traditional methods of research because otherwise they would be collecting online user history data like it's going out of style for the 2008 election.

So you have to wonder what will happen if politicians ever get ahold of the kinds of data that Google and MySpace are acquiring.  In this case, knowledge truly does equal power.  If you know that people who have arthritis also prefer the color yellow, love 50's rock bands, and think that baseball players are overpaid, you could pretty easily target those people with customized political ads that don't say much of anything at all but that those people would absolutely dig just because they're tailored to appeal to them.

If you know anything about building software, that's not really a stretch.  And what's scary is, those people wouldn't realize that the ad that they'd just seen was built on the fly to cater to their tastes.  They would think that politician running the ad was just like them.  Even if the politician really hated the color yellow, can't stand oldies, and owns a baseball team, the person looking at the ad would have no way of knowing that.  They would just assume that the politician had similar tastes to them because otherwise why would they be running that ad?

I hope that Google and MySpace maintain their integrity in this area.  A contribution of demographic data to a campaign would be infinitely more valuable than any kind of monetary donation they could give.  I truly believe that a political campaign with that data and intelligent data analysts would be unstoppable.  These kinds of thoughts make me realize just how critical it is to push people's data back into their owns hands sooner rather than later, so that they can choose to share their behavioral patterns with other people and organizations if they want to, and only if they want to.