Freeing our data

Certain blogs make the user less smart by reading them, and I don't know how Scripting News has done it for a decade now.

This is old hat. Dave missed the Data Sharing Summit last October, and has apparently never blogged about it. It doesn't look like he made the second summit last week-- he was in Cambridge for Berkman@10. Still, only yesterday he blogged about Friday's "Gillmor Gang" podcast on data portability

Anyhoo, I saw this tidbit on the DSS website from October:
"Did you know that Ning enables you to export your entire network's worth of user data and content? Kudos to Marc, Gina, Diego and the whole team at Ning!"

Ring-a-ding Ning! Seems they should get the first annual Winer Award. But this is the tragedy of the weblog world that Winer wrought. Everyone is so damn lazy to look up things for themselves, or they just expect the readers to do it. Well, this reader is tired of doing thankless labor for BusinessWeek.

I've been writing about this stuff for decades. I named my last company for this idea (UserLand) started in 1988.

Data Sharing Summit? What a waste of time. It's going to happen on its own, not by having self-important supposed "summits" of people talking about data sharing. It's the doing of data sharing that matters. What arrogance to say my blog makes people less smart. Where's your blog and who exactly is Jon Garfunkel and what have you done other than occupy space?

I've shared a lot of data Mr Garfunkel, and even better I've created mechanisms for other people to do so.

Anyway -- I was going to comment on Mr Baker's post before I saw this rude comment.

The dating site idea is pretty simple, glad you picked up on it. There's no data involved that anyone else can say they have rights to, it's not like a contact list on Facebook where my contacts might object. These are my movie ratings.

And even if the people you meet on match.com don't turn out to be the love of your life, at least they're people you might enjoy going out to a movie and dinner with! :-)

Unlike Mr Garfunkel who is a perfect illustration why I stay far away from summits. They attract people with more opinions than ideas.

I have not attended the Data Sharing Summits, so I have no special insight on what transpired. But, it happened, there is plenty of information on the web about it-- provided one knows where to look for it. And providing a link to it-- with whatever editorial comment you like-- would help the reader find it, not to mention make their own judgment on the efficacy of the conference.

By skipping the link, you lull readers (such as our host here) into the impression that you're the only guy thinking about this.

As you yourself said in 2002: "If you don't link you're still ink-stained."

I believe Mr. Winer could google Jon Garfunkel and Civilities would be the top link. Which sort of makes Jon's point with respect to not doing any homework before posting and linking.

Jon's original point was that Mr. Baker used Mr. Winer's post as the lede for what is essentially a plug for his book. Mr. Winer is a high attention-earner, and so the impression this reader gets is that Mr. Baker is less interested in advancing the notion of data portability than he is in drawing attention to his book.

Or maybe Jon's right and everyone's just too lazy to look things up for themselves.

Either way, nothing to cheer about.

As an aside, I'd say I'm inclined to believe that a "summit" on the topic, self-important or not, is likely just as good an "idea" to advance the notion as an "award." Indeed, likely better.

Well, I won't say I'm innocent, but I'm not exactly guilty either. As far as plugging the book goes... I worked on the book for a long time and if something comes up that relates to it, I'm likely to have an interest and will blog it. Then the question is whether I mention the book and link to it. I guess I do it a certain amount of the time. I try not to overdo it, though some may think that I don't try hard enough.

I actually did ping Dave (Rogers) about this-- we'd been having a chat about negativity and flaming, and so I said, hey, lookee here.

Dave R., I was not making the point that the book plug was a problem. Actually, I like when people do that, because it connects some idle thoughts (on data portability) with something more substantive, which is presumably in a book.

Steve, as for your central point, that sharing data is good for business, I just don't know. I haven't seen a convincing argument made.

I don't even know how much stock to place in that statement from the first Summit. Here's what VentureBeat wrote in November: "First, users of any particular social network built on Ning can’t share their data across different Ning social networks, negating the advantages of network effects. This means that each social network on Ning has to grow an audience to start from scratch."

So it's just more time to investigate this.