Last year, The British Library's Mechanical Curator project, using facial recognition tools and Flickr hosting, published over 1 million historical scans from books of the 1700-1900s. It's a fascinating example of big data at work. Indexing and curating such a large collection would be nearly impossible without crowd-sourcing and complex algorithms to analyze the imagery.
Imagine a world without Google, or any search engine on the internet. How would you find anything? What if you had to browse through 200 year-old books to find a URL to a web site, then manually search through each link on a web site to find a photo?
For all of the 30-50 billion or so web pages on the internet, there is still a world outside that contains far more information than will ever be digitized, categorized, or classified.
After visiting London, my retirement dream is to have a small boat moored for a couple of months each year near the British Museum and British Library. Nothing fancy, as long as it has internet access and a sitting room for reading a book or two...
