All of a sudden (though probably not--I'm just catching on) there's a rash of services that crunch plain text or data keys and return parsed, formatted, drilled-down usable data. For example...
Tripit will digest all your travel confirmations and produce a rich itinerary.
Google SMS will take a zip code, flight number, etc., from your cell phone, and return a rich data node.
Opencalais is a platform for doing stuff like this.
