A YouTube for Data

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reports on a new website called Swivel that is billing itself as the "YouTube for Data." Swivel is (or will be) an open database for uploading, downloading, analyzing, and viewing all kinds of data, from weather data to financial data. The analytical capabilities mentioned so far are correlations between datasets, such as weather and stocks. Arrington predicts that academics will "go nuts over this," but do they realize how many scientific databases exist already? Swivel may be useful as the everyman's database as well as a good place to make data accessible to others when institutional red tape makes university or other academic databases impractical or otherwise impossible. But now imagine the havoc the site could wreck when proprietary data is uploaded to the site, whether it's a scientists's stolen research data or a pharmaceutical company's drug testing data. The damage could be as bad as or worse than what traditional media companies are facing with regard to copyright violations and piracy. For an extra fee, the site provides the option to keep your data private. Now this could be handy for researchers who want a place to store datasets without the hassle of buying their own hardware. There's no word yet on what the cost of private data storage will be. Swivel is expected to launch later this week.