I am afraid that people will be afraid of what I’ll say here, but: we are slowly, but surely, switching from a Web where Data worth everything to a Web where Data worth nothing.Why people are afraid of that? Because such a switch adds insecurity into their plans, their businesses and so their lives. Such people will ask themselves:

How the hell should I do money if my data worth nothing? What my business plan will be? How should I manage that? Nah, that guy is crazy, it will never happens in my life time… data worth just too much on the Web!

Knowledge is power after all!

Yeah knowledge is power. But the question is: is data the knowledge? Is knowledge a synonym of data?

I don’t think so. Data is nothing; data worth nothing; data is everywhere; data is generated by anything on this Planet.

Data worth nothing, it is what you will do with data, how you will use it, how you will process it that worth everything.

Data worth nothing; this is the process getting data to create knowledge that worth everything.

The key of a successful business plan in a Web where data worth nothing is the process: how to manipulate, how to do calculations over that data to make it meaningful and knowledgeable?

This is the process that worth everything in a Web where data worth nothing.

Now that I say that, check what will happen with the Web in 5 years.

The conclusion of this story is not to be afraid to give your data away. In any case, you can only benefit from doing so.

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5 thoughts on “From a Web where data worth Everything to a Web where data worth Nothing

  1. Knowledge is power but power corrupts!

  2. Good analogy. The information super highway is in full effect.

  3. I would love to live in a world where data is freely available on the web. But I wonder if five years isn’t too short.

    Let’s assume that data is worth nothing. But it still has the potential to be worth something (maybe a lot) if I do something clever with it. If I own data, and you don’t, then I also own that “potential”. If I share the data with you, then it’s possible that you do something very useful and profitable with my data. I could consider a loss of profit on my part.

    Perhaps if there data-sharing contracts or some data laws enforced, data sources and data shapers could share in profits.

    Any ideas on how to liberate the data?

  4. Hi Sean,

    Yeah, you are right when you say that the “potential” worth something. But what I tried to say is that one would probably benefit much more if he gives its data away and get data from other people than if it would only has its own data (at least for people that doesn’t has the resources of the biggest Web portals). That way, its potential would be much greater, so it would worth much more.

    But no, I have no idea how to liberate the data. In fact, I think it is a 1M$ question. Probably that it will liberate itself without people knowing how it does 😉

    Take care and happy new year 2007!

    Salutations,

    Fred

  5. Hi Fred,

    I agree – if everyone were to make their data public, the possibilities are endless. I recently dreamed about a site where experimental data from university research was easily available. Imagine being able to query this site with a general question and getting hard data from half a dozen studies to back up the answer.

    Happy new year to you as well.

    Sean

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