Call it the Wikification of society. More and more, Internet denizens are turning to free-flowing communities of users who gather around specific topics and accumulate information as a group, thus creating an ever-evolving repository of interesting data.

Persata was founded in mid-2006 to create an Internet-based platform for data collaboration. Its framework lets it freely create, gather, and analyze quantitative, measurable information. From there, data is input by users, devices, or "data dumps" from third parties.

"There are 50 million blogs in the world, each one about a specific topic," says Persata co-founder Michael Noble. "Persata is like a data blog. It's a way to communicate with others in a quantitative way, rather than a qualitative, text-based way."

Noble says individuals and businesses will contribute data to Persata in order to leverage the "wisdom of crowds" theory-the idea that the group is smarter than the individual. A user dashboard will display all of the pieces of data in the user's life or business.

For example, a woman using the site can see the date of her most recent breast cancer diagnosis, her average expenses for the month, stock options she's accumulated, and value of her home.

Each bit of data joins a "crowd" among thousands of similar data points, and simple analysis and reporting tools are used to measure data against that of others.

The goal for the user is to "use the information to make better decisions about your life or business," says Noble.

Persata also boasts business applications. "Users will contract with Persata in order to have access to our real-time, customizable database of behavioral information," Noble says. "Think of it as a real-time census, constantly changing, that can be sliced and diced any which way."

Persata also can be used as an alternate search engine. Instead of returning a million hits on the search "breast cancer," Persata returns the average age of diagnosis, most common chemo drugs, average costs of treatment and medications, percent of patients who undergo mastectomies, and so on.

"We pull out the nuggets of information on a specific topic," says Noble.


> Visit Persata for more information.