Leveraging the Internet's unique data repositories
Sometimes, data doesn't look like data. But when circumstances conspire and the right researchers come along, interesting facets of human nature reveal themselves. Last.fm and World of Warcraft are two entities made possible by the Internet, both aimed at entertainment of consumers. However, through new means of social interaction and larger scales of data collection they also, perhaps unintentionally, advanced science. Scientific achievement may seem like a stretch for a music service and a video game, but these unlikely candidates for scientific study show that the information age constantly offers new ways to study human behavior. Last.fm and World of Warcraft are contemporary social constructions, part of the new way that humans interact in our rapidly changing digital world. By applying scientific rigor to the data unwittingly generated by two Internet-based companies, we see that knowledge is everywhere, but sometimes requires creative routes to coax it out of hiding.