[iDC] Will you delete your Feedburner account?
Burak Arikan
arikan at media.mit.edu
Thu Jun 7 15:19:40 EDT 2007
Hi Alex,
I understand your point about the difference between data and
information. I think the Boston Computer Exchange Price Report is a
good example to understand the difference better and how this
aggregation / filtering technique is now inherited and became
ubiquitous. Considering today's complex flow of information I find it
important to dig in how value and labor is evaluated. I think we
should look at the context more particularly rather than generalizing
what is data what is information. Are these data or information?
* A link in Delicious.
* A tag describing a picture in Flickr.
* A comment reacting to a YouTube video.
* A story in Digg.
* Some text describing how I am connected to my friends in Facebook
(same college, same company, met in such club etc).
The problems of capital are deeply examined in the history, so I
don't feel like talking about it at all. I can only say that I don't
appreciate giant things.
"View Source" menu item was the key feature put into the browsers by
the pioneers of the web (from Tim Berners-Lee's original browser to
Marc Anderseen's Mosaic)[*]. This openness feature, affording to look
inside, helped me learn HTML like many other kids in the world, which
later changed my life.
Today I think what we need is something as simple as this: "View Data".
burak
[*] Open Source Paradigm Shift, 2004, Tim O'Reilly. http://
tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html
On Jun 7, 2007, at 10:50 AM, Alex -Vipowernet wrote:
> 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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