We’re a little data-obsessed over here, mostly because we spend time daily pulling down a bunch of user-generated content to identify and analyze opinion. So we think about how to get data, how to clean data, and just how much more of it there’s likely to be with the growth of online discussion.

You can agree or disagree with some of the conclusions drawn from this interesting series of vignettes in Wired’s The Petabyte Age — death of science! supremacy of data over theory! — but the sheer volume of bytes being generated is indisputable.

Today, TechCrunch commented on Amazon’s new S3 pricing: getting bigger just keeps getting cheaper and easier. There’s enough hype about cloud computing to make everyone tired of the term, but developing reasonable ways to process vast amounts of interesting data is truly revolutionary.