Feedonomics

The Association of College & Research Libraries blog explores the problems of creating “cool” library sites for students to hang out in. These attempts to mimic the Facebook experience as a way of making a site acceptable to Gen Y often fail, because they are seen as “creepy treehouses” by the intended users. I wonder if feeds share this generation gap? If young people never have to worry about data as a something with an independent existence, then maybe they naturally identify anything having to do with data as belonging to an older generation. My kids grew up with virtual data, rather than physical forms, such as floppy disks. They “save” their school work by emailing it to themselves. I know what they have gained by assuming everything is in the cloud, but what have they lost?

Marc Canter frames the data portability debate as a power to the people struggle. I agree that the data is already out there, but after we “take it to the streets” who will provide the solution? Is he looking for data portability legislation? Does he want a government Data Security Administration to provide a data safety net for the masses? Will he form a free data party? The data problem isn’t political, it is economic. It will take a viable, free-market economic model that allows for a true data economy where thousands of companies can afford to offer data services. If the current economic model makes sure that only a few companies can afford to manage our data for us, then we are guaranteed to have a data oligopoly.

It only exists as data if it can be accessed. It is only a resource if it can be exploited. Otherwise it is just a balance sheet entry. Arrington thinks ownership is the key, but then a corporate lawyer would. I’m not saying data must be free. There still needs to be a data economy if the pipes are going to be paid for, but the flow is what matters, not the reservoir. Google made their money not by acquiring data, but by speeding up the flow. Data generates power through motion.

Josh Kopleman almost gets it right when he writes about the “Atomization of Conversation,” but it isn’t the discrete packaging that is the key. The real difference is the conversion of human uttterances into machine readable format. Data is interchangeable, aggregatable, republishable, APIable. The Web is now a collection of clients, and people are the servers. Twitter is the IBM punchcard of the 21st century.