Google just announced its first foray into making public data searchable and viewable in graph form. The company is starting with population and unemployment data from around the US but promises to make far more data sets searchable in the future.
These first data sets come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division, but as Google explains in its announcement there are far more sources of information that could be included.
The coming era of the web is based on data, on drawing patterns and meaning out of a far larger body of data than the human mind alone could ever comprehend. The explosion of data (much of which is now created by the people formerly known as the audience), combined with commodity level storage and processing power, makes technology like what Google began to unveil today possible and important.
Automated summary from: Read Write Web
