In case you missed the news when it first broke (I did), here's an intriguing bit of turnabout:
Back on May 1, the Village Voice reported: "Barely a year after their reporters won a Pulitzer prize for exposing data mining of ordinary citizens by a government spy agency, New York Times officials had some exciting news for stockholders last week: The Times company plans to do its own data mining of ordinary citizens, in the name of online profits."
Here's the relevant portion of the address by Janet Robinson, president of the New York Times Company: "R&D is also focusing on such new tools and services as data mining, to identify hidden patterns in the behavior of visitors to our Web sites. This will help us to better serve our customers by presenting our content in more engaging ways. It will also serve our advertisers by increasing our ability to target and optimize their campaigns."
It makes sense from a business perspective, and data mining is not inherently nefarious -- but I wonder how NYT.com readers will take to the news? I think Andrew McCaskey of Slashdot Review summed it up best in his May 10 podcast: "The problem with reading newspapers electronically is that they can also read you at the same time."
None of this surprises me. In fact, I'll predict that...
