Whitney McNamara's Sea Monkey Rodeo.
This blog moved over here in August 2006. Come by if you're interested in newer posts.
rss feed
del.icio.us links
My ten most recent del.icio.us bookmarks listed below. Also spliced into the RSS feed, courtesy of FeedBurner.
monthly archives
June 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
September 2006
contact email
seamonkey (located at) absono.us
creative commons
standard disclaimer
All opinions expressed here are, of course, entirely my own personal views, and do not reflect the views of my employer or its associated companies.
Monday, June 27, 2005
Explicitly Social Software: We Have Met the Network and It Is Us
The Infectious Greed post Data Should be the Intel Outside has been getting a bit of play in the last few days. In it, Paul Kedrosky proposes that the spectre of proprietary data is hovering over the green fields of Web2.0. [Go read the post now if you haven't already.] And, for a number of reasons, I agree with him.
Seems to me that we're now seeing some real movement towards the age of Explicitly Social Software; when people say that "the network is the computer" these days, they're not talking about Sun, nor even about the power that comes from using that network to share and develop open technologies. Rather, people are talking about how their data -- their data, I emphasize -- lives on the network now, not a single computer. That network is made up of data of the people, by the people, and for the people, if you will.
That's a complicated thing, though. If you're providing one of those services out on the network and need to make enough money to keep the lights on, it's a scary thing to remove "data lock in" from your day-to-day toolkit. If you're using those services, how much information do you actually want shared? How do you manage all of that data now that the network is your computer, and then damn thing never shuts down?
At this point I doubt that we'll ever hit the point where all data is open, and believe that there's going to be a fair amount of resistance and bizarre "sorta shared" experiments before we even get to "most data is open." But this is something that matters to us -- the people who make up the network -- and will matter a lot more five years from now; as Paul says, the time to start working on this is now. And unfortunately, we are the network, so there really isn't anybody else to do it for us...
