I noted Dave’s post link to an NYTimes story about NFLX publishing 100MM movie ratings, and thought to myself, “they finally listened… can’t wait to see how SEO effects their acquisition numbers”.
Instead, it turns out they’re publishing a huge dataset (not SEOed pages) for all takers to play with (and for which someone can win a $1MM prize). I immediately thought of Pandora, Aggregate Knowledge and StumbleUpon (and, if I read the tea leaves correctly from the takeaways from a recent “Social Search” conference, perhaps Digg too…); could any of these guys walk away with a cool million and some great publicity for work they’ve already got (largely or in partly) in the bag? Hmm…
Hacking Netflix (truly living up to its name in this instance!) has more, as does TechMeme.
Don’t forget Loomia!