I was always was wondering how much user attention data companies are sitting on without any real use! If they release that data lot's of interesting stuff might pop up.
Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Myspace/Facebook have a lot of these - they should give people access to it, so hackers can start thinking of ways to use it. Both sides win!<p>For example twitter/friendfeed stream from Amazon browsing and you can share that stream with your friends or public. Bought items, considered items, wished items, reviewed items, songs/books etc. Privacy put aside - it will be a lot of fun to explore some of this data. And yes, you should have the right to sell this data to interested parties.
All of these folks have a lot of such data, but they're hardly just sitting on it. Amazon uses it to push product; Google uses it to measure and improve both organic results and paid advertising; etc.<p>It would be great to have broader access to this data, and I believe the privacy concerns can be addressed. But it would be asking a lot of these folks to share what may be their most valuable intellectual property: what they've learned from their users.
This post is part of a series that goes through the ten principles from Mankiw's Brief Principles of Macroeconomics (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Principles-Macroeconomics-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/0324236972/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Principles-Macroeconomics-Gregor...</a>) and uses them as a jumping off point to analyze information and attention markets. The last of these do try to apply the notion of inflation to these markets.
Where's with the macroeconomics? There is a generally accepted, narrow definition of macroeconomics, and this isn't it.<p>None of the four basic principles in this post are exclusive to macroeconomics, which deals with the economies of nations at a (you guessed it) macro level, eg. GDP, inflation, unemployment, etc. What macro-level indicators are there in information and attention?
I'm not trained as an economist, but I understand microeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of individuals and macroeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of the economy as a whole. The first 4 of the 10 principles are micro, but the later ones are certainly macro.