The Power of Unintentional Data

There's a line of travel advice that travels round my family now and again. It says, when you're traveling in France, stop for lunch where you see all the trucks have stopped. That's where you'll find the best food.

The intention of the truck drivers is to get a good meal. But their trucks send an unintentional message to anyone who happens to be passing down the road: "the food's good here."

The same is true on the Internet. Anyone who has the power to look at traffic data, has the ability read that data unintentionally created by people trying to get things done. That is why people looks at their traffic in their sites. It tells them what people want on their sites. But the more data you have, the more accurate and interesting your information is going to be.

Miguel Helft wrote and article in the New York Times today looking at how Google beleives it can map the progress of a flu epidemic by analyzing searched for words associated with flu.

This raises a conundrum for Web entrepreneurs. The greatest successes on the Web seem to come from unintentional behavior. But most Web builders are trying to encourage intentional behavior. In this case companies have set up sites which encourage users to report their illnesses online. The sites get no traffic compared to the number of people who go to Google and search for relief from flu symptoms. And anyone who thinks about their own behavior knows why.

So the question is: how do companies who aren't Google or Yahoo harness the useful but unintentional actions of Web users?