by thenewgreen

Part of the reason for that is that Big Data has finally begun to produce some very real, tractable, monetizable techniques. As an example, see a couple of patents Microsoft filed several years ago. Roughly described, the first one allows the company to put a number on any identity's ability to influence others around a particular word or topic. So for the word cheese, you might have a high score of 88 because you run a popular cheese blog, whereas I might be lactose intolerant and only have a score of 17. The second patent is more interesting: It allows Microsoft to dynamically price a good or service based on your score.