The latest craze on the internet is the migration of applications from desktop to the Web. The latest is “Swivel”: the internet archive for data, something I have written about before. While there is not much to be seen at the site, TechCrunch has some intriguing snapshots.

I guess that one can upload the data, access data that others have posted, and perform some simple types of analysis. It might not sound much, but having a database of data will remove the need for people to provide summaries of it. Anyone interested in the problem can perform the summaries for himself. This will make data analysis much more approachable than before. This can also become competition to existing spreadsheet and statistical software, and a platform for deploying recent research: it is often frustrating for a researcher in statistical methodology how difficult it is to actually enable users to benefit from the most recent advances in the research sphere.