Tim Harford had a nice article this weekend about how working out what might happen in the future is only slightly more difficult than working out what’s happening now.

He highlights a prediction made in the Financial Times on New Year’s Eve 2007, that the US would “avoid tipping over the brink” into recession. Not only did it turn out to be wrong, but we learned later that at the time of publication, the US was already in recession.

Real-time data from the web, despite all its limitations, provides a way around this problem. And while Harford is talking mostly about economic forecasts, the same goes for market research.