ReadWriteWeb

The Web is awash in "exchange data" - from apartment listings on Craigslist to job listings on LinkedIn, Monster and Twitter. There are handcrafted goods on Etsy and real estate offerings on Zillow. But each site offers its own method for hosting similar data, with the end user left to visit each site to access it. For developers, the data is often held captive and inaccessible. Greg Kidd, founder and CEO of 3taps, argues that this data "should be available to the public" and is launching a "Data Commons" to do just that.

3taps is launching today at the Data 2.0 conference in San Francisco, offering a platform for collecting a distributing exchange data, in an attempt to "democratize the exchange space."

Earlier this year we wrote about an infographic that visualized what 10 petabytes looks like.

An infographic tonight by the team at Focus takes a different look at how data is defined.

The Focus infographic "uses measures only associated with data." Quantities of data are discussed in abstract terms.

Yesterday we reported that Data.gov and several other Web-based public data outlets may be closed as a result of proposed budget cuts. The Sunlight Foundation is trying to save these sites you can learn more about that here.

But as Clive Thompson points out in an article for Wired, these public data sites were never living up to their promise or potential in the first place. "Bureaucrats still snooze atop mountains of public data, with no political imperative to release it," Thompson writes. "It's not something senators and congresspeople fret about while nursing martinis with lobbyists."

What could both save Data.gov and make it more useful? Thompson suggests that we hammer home the potential open data has for job creation.

How often should you post updates to Twitter for maximum impact? Is there a time of day that works best? What about a day of the week?

These are the types of questions that Dan Zarrella is constantly trying to answer. Instead of relying on intuition and hearsay, however, the self-described "social media scientist" prefers to take a look a look at things more objectively, using data.

Yesterday at the GigaOM Structure Big Data conference in New York City, Apache Cassandra parent company DataStax announced a new product that integrates Cassandra, Hive and Apache Hadoop. The new product, called Brisk, essentially uses Cassandra to replace Hbase and the Hadoop storage layer. "There's a lot of nice properties about using the Hadoop programming model on top of a Cassandra layer, especially if you're already using the database and want to do more large-scale batch processing," says ReadWriteWeb resident big data expert Pete Warden.

This new permutation of Hadoop represents the ongoing evolution of the database.

Social CRM, as a concept, has been around for five or six years now, according to Paul Greenberg and Estaban Kolsky, two analysts interviewed on the subject by Dennis Howlett. But we're only just now starting to understand the concept, and it may be several years before we have any real success stories in the area. Never the less, we can already learn a few lessons from the pioneers of social CRM.

As location-based services continue to spring up, it's becoming increasingly important that these companies have access to correction location data. However, there's no one place where developers can go to access or verify this data, and there's no single database for location-based information.

But Foursquare has just announced an effort to move things in that direction: a "venue harmonization map" that it says it hopes can serve as a Rosetta Stone, of sorts, for location data.

Last night, the folks over at Infochimps, an online data marketplace - or the "Amazon of data," as they like to call it - were celebrating the launch of their new website and the thousands of new API calls it contains. These API calls are like plug-and-play bits of code developers can insert into their applications, so they can focus on other things like the overall design, the user interface and the features.

After only a few minutes of looking through the types of dataset queries Infochimps has on hand, I was excited about the kinds of new applications they could enable. How about an app that finds everyone on Twitter with a particular keyword in their bio and then lets you follow them or add them to a Twitter list, for example? Or an app that helps you identify the most influential Twitter users? These were just two of the API calls I saw in action last night, but there are thousands more (and they're not all Twitter-related, of course). If you're developing a new data-dependant application, Infochimps is a valuable resource you should check out.

Social analytics company Linkfluence began migrating from CouchDB to Riak recently. A blog post by Linkfluence's Franck Cuny explains the reasons and sheds some light on the advantages and disadvantages of different non-relational databases.

Linkfluence used CouchDB primarily to store Web content and metadata. It uses other databases such as PostgresSQL, MongoDB and Redis for other purposes.