Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically
destinyland writes "A year ago, Aaron Stanton harangued Google over his new project, a web site analyzing patterns in books to generate infallible recommendations. In March he finally finished a prototype which he showed to Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, and he's just announced that he's finally received a big contract which 'gives us a great deal of potential data to work with.' The 25-year-old's original prototype examined over 200 books, plotting 729,000 data points across 30,293 scenes — but its universe of analyzed novels is about to become much, much bigger."
I love how the prototype version in the link gives a 98% match between George Orwell's '1984' and the text of the USA Patriot Act!
I dunno, man. Pretty much every point you covered is Wiki-able. [Citation needed]
DATABASE WOW WOW
What about synonyms?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.