This seems to be the big news of the day, Alexa has essentially popped open the doors on it’s data and is now allowing anyone willing to pay a fairly nominal fee to access the information from it’s crawls. The news is all over; a good starting point is here.

This is pretty exciting news from a search standpoint; it has the potential to totally flatten the search space as individual developers can get into fairly narrow niches and be able to use a very deep cache of web data in their queries. The prices seem very reasonable, to boot, reasonable enough that developers could monetise their own work while still paying Alexa/Amazon for the access their providing - sharing at it’s very best, and a huge push to the Web2.0 application sphere - if we thought search was exploding before, just wait’ll apps built on this service starting hitting the wires. I wonder how much pressure Google will have now to provide easy access to it’s cache; they oughta be sitting up and listeneing becuase everyone can make money on things like this.

My greater interest, though, is how this might be useful in the attention sphere. How can attention services or individual users interested in attention data use these services. I’d love to see some simple-to-use apps come out of this that a blogger or general user could install on the blog/site/desktop to pull data back from the Alexa cloud. How many of us would use more than 300 such queries a day, below which point the Alexa services are essentiually free. Or could a site provide a way to pass through your Amazon Web Servbices user information so that you could create a query using their code but pay for it out of your account? Is this a step towards a more wide-open access to Amazon’s data? Can we look forward to being able to freely access and use the attention data that Amazon’s collecting about us - will they follow the AttentionTrust Principles?

There are some limitations in the licensing agreement that might make it hard for some apps to be completely scalable (1 query per second per IP in particular seems like it could pose problems) but all in all a tremendous step forward in leveling the playing space.