“’Data exhaust’—the trail of clicks that internet users leave behind from which value can be extracted—is becoming a mainstay of the internet economy. One example is Google’s search engine, which is partly guided by the number of clicks on an item to help determine its relevance to a search query. If the eighth listing for a search term is the one most people go to, the algorithm puts it higher up.” –The Economist

After reading the economist piece ‘Data, data everywhere’, I can’t help to think, how close are we from being in a world that looks like something depicted by the Wachowski brother’s 1999 film “The Matrix?” I already have several digital representations of myself, one of which you are reading right now. Aside from the privacy concerns, most of the information I consume daily comes in a digital form. Measuring how and what information I am consuming currently could be considered “data exhaust” to many folks. However, for advertisers, it gives clear insight as to what I like and how I go about finding it. What if you could take all of the information about me that is already available online,  and marry that to my foursquare account, or information gathered by RFID chips? We would truly have what @DeanDonaldson called “Addressable Advertising.” This information goes far beyond traditional behavioral targeting because it can give insights and predictions as to what I will be doing 5 minutes from now and how to best talk to me at THAT time.

Remember, the byproduct of boiling water was once considered exhaust and it took the great minds of Hero, Thomas Newcomen, and James Watt to leverage that exhaust by creating the steam engine. The result from this innovative use of exhaust was the industrial revolution. Cisco predicts that internet traffic will reach 667 exabytes by the year 2013. To put that in to today’s terms, that’s 1billion gigabytes, and an untold amount of “exhaust.” Will we have another revolution on our hands?