Author Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial post recently about the use of hyperlinks in online content, in which he argued that links were a distraction for readers, and were likely to lead to less comprehension rather than more. This idea was an offshoot of Carr’s latest book, The Shallows, which makes the claim that the Internet — and digital media in general — are making society dumber rather than smarter. Now Scott Rosenberg, one of the founders of the online magazine Salon and of a new media-accuracy startup called MediaBugs, has written an admirable series of posts defending the link as the heart and soul of the web. In his original post, Carr described links as “conveniences,” but said they also functioned as a distraction for readers:

Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read,” he wrote. “Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head.

The author said that research he looked at for his book showed this created a “cognitive load” for readers, and those who read hypertext “comprehend and learn less… than those who read the same material in printed form.” Some prominent writers and media figures agreed with Carr’s take, including — ironically — Laura Miller, a writer and book reviewer with Salon, who argued that links shouldn’t be necessary if writers did their job of synthesizing the topic properly, and said that most people don’t click on links anyway. Carr also got some support from Jason Fry, writing at the Neiman Journalism Lab, and Ryan Chittum in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review (in the spirit of full disclosure, I wrote about Carr’s argument on my personal blog).

As Rosenberg describes in his first post in response to Carr, much of the research that the author relies on for his attack on hyperlinks and comprehension don’t really fit with his broad thesis. For example, the kinds of links that were studied in the research Carr uses in “The Shallows” had nothing to do with adding context to the text that they were embedded in; in other words, they weren’t the kind of hyperlinks that everyone is used to in blog posts and other Internet content. As Rosenberg notes:

All this study proved was something we already knew: that badly executed hypertext can indeed ruin the process of reading. So, of course, can badly executed narrative structure, or grammar, or punctuation.

Instead of impeding understanding, as Carr and his supporters argue, Rosenberg says he believes that they deepen it, quoting author Steven Johnson as saying that links are a tool for synthesis, “a way of drawing connections between things,” to bring coherence to the vast universe of information online. “The Web’s links don’t make it a vast wasteland or a murky shallows,” Rosenberg says, “they organize and enrich it.” I’m firmly on the Salon founder’s side in this one — without links, what point is there in having hypertext at all? The whole idea behind Tim Berners-Lee’s invention was to enable sites to point to each other and create a “web” of context. Do they impose a cognitive load of some kind on users? Possibly, but in my view, the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.

In his second post on links, Rosenberg first takes on what he calls “corporate linking,” which is the practice of clogging up text with links “because they provide some tangible business value to the linker: they cookie a user for an affiliate program, or boost a target page’s Google rank, or aim to increase a site’s “stickiness” by getting the reader to click through to another page.” Rosenberg also argues that much of this is Google’s responsibility, because of the value attached to page rank and links:

Google is a great tool because it draws meaning from links. And it is a profitable company because it has placed a tiny but real financial value on many links. But by making links a business, Google also made it harder for editors and writers to defend responsible linking.

In the third post in his series, Rosenberg says that even if Carr is right and links do slow down reading and get in the way of understanding the content they appear in, he would still prefer to have links, because they are “additive and creative.” Links pull together different pieces of a topic and connect them into a whole, he says, and at their best, they also “show a writer’s work” and are “badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work.” Rosenberg adds that the use of links has multiple benefits, including:

• Saying hello. “A link to another site can serve as a way of telling that site, ‘I just said something about you.’ This kind of link remains a valid and valuable social gesture.”
• Showing your work. “Some people are happier with this stuff collected at the end, as we did for centuries in print. But linking in situ gives the reader the information right where it’s needed.”
• Fairness. “Does a writer present the perspectives of those he disagrees with in a way that they feel is fair? Linking to those perspectives is a way for a writer to say: Go ahead — see if I got you right.”
• Adding context. “A fragment that gets connected is no longer a fragment. It becomes a working part, a piece of a mosaic, a strand in a web.”

As Rosenberg puts it in the conclusion to his series, writing online without linking “is like making a movie without cutting. Sure, it can be done; there might even be a few situations where it makes sense. But most of the time, it’s just head-scratchingly self-limiting. To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.” Hear, hear.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users papalars and Robert Brook

If the rumors are indeed true, then RIM has made a great buy. Unlike the Cellmania purchase, this one actually makes a lot of sense and I would put it right next to last year’s acquisition of WebKit browser maker, Torch Mobile.

Given how much of Blackberry is used inside the enterprise, it makes perfect sense for RIM to add apps for the enterprise to its arsenal. The company despite a higher install base than some of its newer rivals has struggled to capture the imagination of developers. Many of the best Blackberry apps are infact being made by RIM itself. DataViz’s products would also be ideally suited for the company’s rumored iPad competitor.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d): To Win In the Mobile Market, Focus On Consumer

As it stands now, Ping is explicitly about selling music on the iTunes store. Om thinks it foreshadows the future of social commerce, but where else could Apple take Ping, and how far?

Some analysts describe social networking as air, but perhaps the more relevant metaphor is electricity. In this view, companies and sites tap into social networking to create applications or experiences. Right now, Apple is treating social media as electricity to fuel its own shopping and communications applications.

Apple makes its money by selling products and “renting” its distribution channel. It likely won’t hire an advertising sales force, and Apple’s Me.com is a weak collection of fee-based services. I suspect Apple’s more comfortable creating social networking features that enhance its products and marketplaces, rather than building out a free-standing social network.

Standalone social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, then, probably won’t face Apple as a head-to-head competitor for their audiences, advertisers or what they deliver as their core user experience. Apple doesn’t appear to be interested in building a general-purpose social network, a short message broadcasting service, or a professional connections network. MySpace is way ahead of Apple in gathering artists’ pages and a social music audience, but Apple’s ability to drive sales makes it a fierce competitor for label attention.

Those companies, and others like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, who aspire to provide social media APIs, services and even infrastructure, should cultivate, rather than compete with Apple, especially if they want to reach Apple’s customers. That means they should license or, if Apple’s in its usual DIY mode, integrate their own social networking technologies with Apple’s. By the time you read this, Ping users may be able to find their friends via Facebook Connect.

Read the full post here.

Maybe it’s just that it was frigidly cold in San Francisco for most of the last few months. Or maybe it’s that those dang super angels haven’t heard about how in August all venture capitalists are supposed to take their kids to the South of France — or at least Tahoe. Not that I’m complaining; I much prefer writing about real news than making something up!

In case you did take off to an island somewhere, or if you want to reminisce about how gosh-darn hard we all worked for the last three months, here’s a sprinkling of highlights from our top summer stories:

• June 11: How Much Is a Facebook Fan Really Worth?
• June 16: Technology Quiets the Vuvuzela in Real Time
• June 19: App Creep and the Case for the Mobile Browser
• July 7:  My iTunes Account Was Hacked for $375 — By My Own Kids
• July 20: Flipboard Buys Ellerdale, Launches Social Digital Magazine
• July 21: Fred Wilson: Apple is “Evil” and Facebook is “a Photo-sharing Site”
• July 24: 7 Reasons Why Techies Love Inception
• July 16: Apple: iPhone 4 Issues Blown out of Proportion
• July 27: Leaked Facebook Movie Script Paints Zuckerberg as Vindictive and Naive
• August 2: Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S.
• August 2: How Big is Amazon’s Cloud Computing Business? Find Out
• August 9: Skype Files for IPO
• August 9: Tech Companies, Google Sold You Out
• August 13: Demand Media Faces Harsh Spotlight En Route to IPO
• August 18: The Facebook Location Perspective, Then and Now
• August 25: Why Motorola Bought 280 North
• August 31: VMware Goes Beyond Data Centers to Control the Cloud

Photo courtesy Flickr user GViciano.

(Video editor’s note: It was a scorching hot, cloudless day in Palo Alto, Calif. and this supernova-like illumination created harsh shadows, made us squint to save our eyes, and caused some serious sweat.)

Expert and noob grillers alike should definitely try out Swart’s salmon recipe. Not only is it delectable, but it’s easy to make, taking just 20 mins to cook. (I made it on my own last weekend.)

We want to also give a big thank you to The Private Bank of the Peninsula for letting us use their fantastic rooftop patio. If you’re a tech exec who likes to cook and wants to be a guest on our show, email my first name at gigaom dot com.

Cedar plank salmon

1 cedar plank
2 pound salmon fillet
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
6 tablespoons Dijon mustard
6 tablespoons brown sugar

Soak cedar plank in salted water for 2 hours. Remove skin and any remaining bones from salmon fillet. Rinse under cold running water and pat dry with clean paper towels. Place the salmon on the cedar plank and generously salt and pepper, carefully spread the mustard over the top and sides and sprinkle brown sugar on top over the mustard.

Set grill to medium high and place the cedar plank in the center of the hot grate, away from the heat. Cover the grill and cook salmon through, around 20 to 30 minutes to an internal temperature to 135 degrees. Transfer the salmon and plank to a platter and serve right off the plank.

Corn Salad

6 ears of sweet white corn, shucked
1 cup diced red onion (1 medium onion)
1 cup red pepper (1-1/2 peppers)
1 large diced mango
1 large diced & seeded cucumber
5 tablespoons cider vinegar
5 tablespoons good olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro leaves
1/8 cup chopped mint

In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the corn for 3 to 4 minutes, just until the starchiness is gone. Drain and place the cobs in ice water to stop the cooking process. Once the corn is cool, cut the kernels off close to the cob.

In a large bowl, mix the corn, onion, peppers, cucumber, vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, cilantro and mint. Just before serving add the diced mango (to avoid the mango getting too soggy). Taste for seasonings and serve cold or at room temperature. Salad can be made the night before to let the ingredients marinate.

Teriyaki Tri Tip

1 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup olive oil
1/3 cup Japanese sweet rice wine
4 1/2 teaspoons rice vinegar
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/4 cup white sugar
5 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1 dash red pepper flakes
black pepper to taste
ground black pepper to taste
4 pounds beef tri tip, cut into 1 inch slices

Bring rice wine to a boil in a saucepan over high heat. Add in the soy sauce, olive oil, sesame oil, sugar, garlic, ginger, pepper flakes, and pepper. Reduce heat and let simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let the marinade cool. Marinade can be made the night before and stored in the refrigerator to cool. Note: there are some decent commercial teriyaki sauces that you can buy to reduce prep time on this dish.

Once the marinade is cooled in the refrigerator, place the beef tri tip in the marinade, being sure to cover as much of the meat as possible. Cover, and marinate in the refrigerator at least 4 hours.

Preheat an outdoor grill for high heat, and lightly oil grate. Grill the beef 3 to 6 minutes per side, or to desired temperature. Discard the remaining marinade.

Solutions like Trailmeme that help consumers more easily save, tag, annotate, inter-link and share related content as a way to better filter the web sound promising, but we shouldn’t put all the pressure on crowd-sourcing solutions that require consumers to clean up the entire stream.

The Web of Intent will be largely driven by consumers’ actions and interests.  It will be based on implicit actions consumers take around what is most important to them. There’s an emerging opportunity for content publishers (and the publishing technologies they rely upon) to dramatically improve how they filter the stream for the consumers they serve. Once they do, consumers will embrace these improved, personalized content offerings and will in turn provide valuable feedback and insight through the actions they take with the content offered. Here are a few publishing trends that will accelerate the Web of Intent:

1. Search and publishing tools will become more integrated, offering new forms of publishing flexibility that marry a publisher’s originally authored content assets with the best related content from the aggregated and real-time web.
2. Search and publishing integration will help editors more easily monitor the web and curate new content packages across different content types, including articles, blog posts, tweets, photos and video.
3. Publishers will start to produce curated, topical or thematic content “feeds” for their target audiences. For example, consumers will be able to subscribe to curated sports feeds for the latest news about their favorite teams or athletes or gadget feeds covering digital cameras or iPad news.
4. Publishers will also offer more engaging (and valued) user experiences for consumers who “opt-in” to these personalized, filtered feeds providing convenient updates wherever consumers go. Think a better version of Google Alerts — curated by skilled editors from your favorite publisher and available anywhere (Facebook, Twitter, MyYahoo, iPad, iPhone etc.).
5. Consumers will be able to customize these feeds across topics or stories, prioritize sources, receive recommendations and discover new content via their friends and social graph. New forms of social sharing (community) will emerge organized around consumer’s interests and the curated feeds they subscribe to.

A few years ago when I was at Edmunds.com, we implemented an early form of the Web of Intent. For example, if a consumer was interested in a Sedan or BMW 3 Series they would click a link to get more information. As the publisher, we started to understand their intent through their implicit actions and fashioned a dynamic content and monetization experience designed to satisfy their specific interest. To support this, we had to significantly re-architect the way we thought about the design of the site and our entire content and advertising operations to organize around the consumer’s interests. We built everything ourselves, and that investment paid off as the site became the top auto research destination on the web and we significantly increased our revenue per user.

As we look ahead, next-generation content publishing tools will make this transition much easier for publishers. They will be able to quickly transform their content operations beyond articles and blog posts into data and interest-centric publishing structures that allow consumers to follow topics and ongoing stories of interest. As consumers follow their favorite topics or stories, publishers will be able to build a Web of Intent rich in data and profiling based on their audiences’ interests. These interests will offer newer and more robust targeting opportunities and will ultimately provide publishers new opportunities for monetization beyond pure advertising.

The good news for consumers is a number of large publishers are already actively working on these problems and are in the process of redesigning or re-launching their websites to make their sites more “intent-friendly”. Additionally, innovative tech companies are emerging such as Magnify.net in video curation or my6sense which help create personalized content streams.

The Web of Intent will be here sooner than you think.

Matthew Kumin is the former EVP, Media for Edmunds.com and co-founder and CEO of PublishThis, a next-gen content publishing platform.

The giant IFA electronics show is underway in Germany, and as expected, Android tablets are on display. Korean electronics maker Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Tab, and it appears to be a serious competitor for the iPad. The 7-inch tablet is stuffed with the same electronics found inside Samsung’s popular Galaxy S phone line, and has software optimized for the larger Tab screen. Pricing hasn’t been announced by the company, but it will be available in Europe shortly and the U.S. later this year.

Android phone owners wishing there was a seamless way to work with desktop music files similar to the iPhone/ iTunes method should take a look at doubleTwist. We took it for a spin and found it to be a full-featured way to sync Android phones to iTunes music, photos and movies. The program has integration with the Amazon MP3 store for music and the Android Market for working with Android apps. Perhaps best of all, doubleTwist is free.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): Forget, Syncing, Let’s Put Music in the Cloud!

Om claimed that Ping is the future of social commerce, but its sole focus on purchases and its presence behind a walled garden may hinder that bright future. Here are the four main issues Apple has to work on quickly for Ping to be successful:

Ping’s main method of social interaction is based only on new purchases.

In order to populate a social network of any kind, you need to give users the ability to share whatever it is they bring with them. I have over 6000 songs on my laptop alone, and that’s not including what I have stored on my external drive. Probably a third of those were purchased via iTunes. In order to share any of that music with those who are following me, I have to click out of Ping and into the iTunes Store, find an album I already own, and click “Like” on the drop-down menu. It’s a counter-intuitive UI involving too much effort on the part of the user. My music stream — and my actions on certain favorite or hated songs — can already be shared on other services. Why would I bother going through all that when I can click “Love” on last.fm (which is already running in my dock) and share that song through another social network, which may already be providing direct links to Amazon MP3 or another service for purchase?

In addition, Ping is so divorced from the iTunes experience that when I let it auto-populate my “Music I Like” selections at sign-up, soon I had 10 selections of my kids’ music, which they bought with gift cards they’d received as presents. No, Ping, those one-star selections of Hannah Montana and the Chipmunk movie soundtracks are not “music I like.” In fact, when rating that music in iTunes, I think that one-star rating I assigned the kids’ music said I really didn’t like it at all. Buying does not equal liking.

Ping doesn’t allow you to create new tangential conversations, or share additional statuses, locations, or activities with your social graph.

In order to begin any conversation on Ping, I have to do something involving the iTunes store: hunt down a song or album and Like or Post it, or buy something. I can’t begin a conversation with “Hey, did any of you catch that live Arcade Fire show on YouTube? What did you think?” Again, there’s an opportunity here for smart-linking to products based on organic conversations, and Apple is missing the boat. I may think to leave a comment if a purchase or a “like” happens by in my stream, but if I’ve already liked or bought an album and want to bring it up later, I’d have to go digging for the old conversation. I can’t start another one.

The concept may be Apple, but the UI certainly isn’t.

The one point that any Apple fanboy (or fangirl) has always been able to make without argument is how intuitive Apple’s UIs have always been. It’s the original company with a plug-in-and-go M.O. for its products, yet even on Wednesday night, when I joined Ping and talked about it with the early adopter crowd on Twitter, we were all stumbling about. If people who have more than 400 log-in IDs for social networks are confused about how to go about interacting with each other on a social site, how will an average user be able to figure it out? The familiar status box you see at the top of the screen on every social network is missing. If you want to comment on another user’s activity, you have to seek out a small link to pop up a comment box (an existing whitespace would be much more obvious). Worst of all, the drop-down menu that appears on albums or songs in your stream appears to be part of the “Buy Album” button by design, which could make wary users afraid they might purchase the album rather than comment on it.

The social graph is missing.

This is Creating a Social Network 101. No one wants to sign up for a new service, only to manually seek out the same group of people they are friends with on Facebook and follow on Foursquare. They want a quick and simple method of importing contacts from a service like Facebook Connect. The post-launch implosion of an Apple-Facebook deal to piggyback on Facebook’s social graph was a devastating blow for populating a new service. Apple needs to do something quickly to replace it, or those signing up will quickly tire of logging in only to find there’s no new activity in the past three hours. Social networks need a constant stream of activity to keep users engaged.

As for trying to convince my friends to use the service, they don’t want to be bothered, for the most part. They’re already using services on Facebook or MySpace to share music in a much simpler fashion than Ping is providing. In the nearly 48 hours since launch, I’ve assembled a circle of real-world friends and tech connections that, with combined followers and those I follow, is less than 30. Considering I have over 300 friends on Facebook, that’s a pretty small percentage of my social graph.

I listen to my iTunes library during my work day, alternating with Pandora. While I’ll frequently click over to last.fm (if iTunes is running) or Pandora to like or block a song, it’s too hard to do that with Ping because I have to take a break from whatever I’m doing to hunt it down. My other social music sharing is as simple as flipping to another window and clicking a single button. When I do check in to Ping, I have to manually refresh and it’s often hours between updates. Right now, Ping is a lonesome place that seems to be populated only by diehard early adopters and Apple fans.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

With Ping, Apple Builds a Social Network Inside a Walled Garden

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Updated: As a number of readers have pointed out, I read this chart incorrectly. I read absolute numbers of visitors into it, whereas the chart is actually meant to show percentages of traffic. I’ve tried to correct my mis-impressions below — although the chart does still show that Stumbleupon drives a lot of traffic, so my conclusions are not completely wrong.

In a chart of the traffic it gets from a variety of social networks (posted by All Things Digital), Gawker Media showed that the number one referrer is Reddit — which has been gaining momentum recently, thanks in part to the reaction to Digg’s relaunch, but was number one as far back as last year Facebook. Some observers used the chart to point out how much Digg has fallen off in terms of its influence, while others used it to show how Twitter is not as mainstream as most people think. What struck me, however, was how little attention gets paid to the number two and three of the leading referrers on that graph: namely Fark and Stumbleupon.

According to my reading of the chart, Fark drove more than 18 million visitors to Gawker in August — up from less than 10 million in the same period last year — while Stumbleupon drove about 16 million, about double what it sent the network of websites in the same month a year earlier. Twitter accounted for around 12 million (which was still twice the number of visitors it drove a year ago) and Digg was responsible for just under 10 million of the site’s 20 million total visitors in August. Facebook is still in last place, according to Gawker’s numbers, but it’s been growing sharply.

The chart shows that the largest proportion of Gawker’s 20 million total visitors in August came from Facebook, which has gone from being an also-ran to the overall leader in the past year. The proportion of traffic that comes from Digg has shrunk over that period, but the traffic coming from Stumbleupon has grown substantially, putting it a close second place (judging by the size of the colored bars representing each site). Reddit’s share of traffic has also grown, as has Twitter’s.

Fark, which was founded by Drew Curtis in 1999 as a way to share funny links with his friends, doesn’t get a lot of press attention. In fact, the service is virtually never mentioned in stories about Digg’s redesign or the rivalry between Digg and Reddit, or even in stories about Twitter and its growth as a traffic driver. Yet it and Stumbleupon drive relatively huge numbers of readers to many websites. Fark reportedly has more than four million unique visitors a month. Is the lack of attention because Curtis keeps a low profile (he still lives in his home town of Lexington, Ky.), or because the site isn’t venture-funded and isn’t located in Silicon Valley? It’s anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, Stumbleupon — which was started by Canadian Garrett Camp and a small group of friends in 2001 as a spinoff from Camp’s graduate-school research project in Calgary, Alberta — gets a little more press because it was backed by VCs and ultimately bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million. While there was some attention paid to the company after it was bought back by the founders and a small group of venture investors in 2009, the newly independent startup has kept a pretty low profile since. Despite the lack of headlines, however, many publishers (including GigaOM) know that when a link gets “stumbled,” there can often be a huge influx of readers.

Stumbleupon recently announced that it signed up its 10 millionth user, and the company says it has been growing in other ways; according to a blog post, the number of advertisers has climbed by 20 percent, and the company’s headcount has grown by over 50 percent in 2010. The site recently launched iPhone and Android apps as well. A report from Statcounter on social-media traffic shows Facebook is far and away the leader in referrals to sites that use its analytics service, with about 63 percent, and Stumbleupon is in second spot with 16 percent.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Poynton

Normally with this type of data, I’d look into further comparison between Apple, Google and everyone else in the mobile space. But something else stood out when viewing the Quantcast data — Google comes out a winner both today and in the foreseeable future due to mobile search. The main source of Google revenue is indeed search, but the real growth is in searching for data away from the desktop. Google knows this, so it continues to invest heavily in its Android platform. This is also a main reason why it makes the platform attractive to handset makers by giving it away. As Android device sales continue to grow on a faster pace than competing products, more mobile devices that primarily use Google services are in the wild — each one of them a potential money maker for Google through search and ad revenue.

Here’s the funny thing though — Google has been winning such revenues in the mobile space even before Android. All of those iOS devices that Apple has sold, more than 120 million Steve Jobs said this week, come with Google as the default search engine. Might some consumers change their default search? Of course, but I doubt a statistically significant number actually do. It’s only when a carrier or competing search brand enters the picture, just as Verizon did last year when it changed over to Bing on BlackBerry devices.

Essentially, Google has benefitted from mobile search since the iPhone launched in 2007 with Google as the default search engine. But now the search giant is outselling other mobile platforms, and even if Apple removed Google as an available search partner at this point, it would be a temporary setback for Google’s mobile search revenues. Google has had the mobile search market cornered from the beginning, and with Android’s usage growth, it stands to keep that market for some time to come. Well, at least until we see how Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform does — surely it will use Bing as the default, no?

Related content on GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d):

Why Mobile Search is Still Anybody’s Game

Mint’s data can be sorted to find things like the average tab at a certain restaurant, or the actual deals other people are getting for their memberships at a certain local gym. Users can also look at pretty charts that show the average monthly spending by Mint users in a city.

What would be really cool is if Mint released an API for this data, so other services could incorporate it. Imagine if you loaded up the Yelp app to find a nearby restaurant, and instead of sorting by the vague number of dollar signs associated with each venue, you could see how much other customers spent on their tabs on average. You could filter for “dinner under $20 within two blocks of here at a four-star restaurant.” (Of course, Mint doesn’t have item-by-item data, so this would be just the average tab rather than the average meal per person, but hopefully it’s still informative.)

I talked with some folks from Mint about the new feature at an Intuit product showcase last night, and they assured me that Mint Data is anonymized because it only features venues where at least 50 Mint users have spent money. In San Francisco, where I live, the most popular Food & Dining establishment is Starbucks, and the one with the most expensive average purchase is the wine bar Bar Bambino, where Mint users spend an average of $167.97.

If you want more publicly accessible aggregate spending data, you should also check out Bundle, which probably offers a more representative data set given it pulls spending information from Citigroup (c c) (one of its investors).

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns