[iDC] Will you delete your Feedburner account?

[Alex -Vipowernet]

Alex Writes: 
Of course those who aggregate data own it. 
Data is not "information" until it is aggregated into useful order.  
Data is just chaos until you must apply "neg-entropy" to find the patterns and order in the data - THEN you have useful information!

In the 1980's I created the Boston Computer Exchange.  We aggregating data about people who owned computers they wanted to sell and buyers who wanted them.  Once  a week we reported the "BoCoEx Closing Prices Report" and this little report was picked up by all the major computer magazines and appeared as a new item. A lot of people had price information - we had aggregated it and made it into a report - thus we added value. And later sold access to that data to those who needed it...

There is irony in your comment about small companies are being bought up by BIG companies - nothing new in that - what is ironic is that the BIG companies were themselves tiny upstarts just a few years ago... Google did not start as a HUGE enterprise worth billions - it started as two guys in a garage. Same for Feedburner... 

There is no point in trying to stop the process.  It will go on whether you like it or not.  

The message is LOUD - find an area of data that is NOT being addressed and create an enterprise that aggregates data and processes it into useful information.  Any of us could have created YouTube or SecondLife or FeedBurner... Those guys put in the sweat equity to make it a success.  

Find an area that is NOT being addressed and start to work. 

Alex Randall
Professor of Communication - Univ of the Virgin Islands
Former Owner - Boston Computer Exchange


Burak Wrote: 
You've probably following the recent news about the small scale  
social web 2.0 companies being acquired by giant corporations (e.g.,  
StumbleUpon acquired by Ebay, Feedburner acquired by Google).  
Feedburner tracks your blog's RSS feed statistics and shows the  
number of subscribers momentarily, daily, weekly, monthly, and  
yearly. Now all your data is changing hands, from Feedburner to Google.

I wonder how you feel about it?

I think this is an important moment to pay attention to how inhumane  
the data ownership laws in USA: One who aggregates data owns it.
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