Memories of OpenData 2007

Abdur Chowdhury, Summize.com (formerly at AOL, made decision to release the AOL search data.)

• 3 Questions you must ask yourself before opening your data:
• Why are you opening the data?
• Right answer: You firmly believe that you are helping people/consumers.
• What are you going to do once you open the data?
• Are you ready for the unexpected consequences?

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Gerry Campell

• This is sort of a “coming out party” for Reuters.
• We (Reuters) have content and he have to connect with our consumers. They have trouble finding it.
• Reuters is watching what’s happening out there, looking for how it can serve vertical markets: finance, technology, you name it.

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Esther Dyson

• You’re 85 years old and on your deathbed.  You have 50 million dollars and you have 10,000 friends on Friendster 8.0 … Which is weirder?! You can’t spend all the money and you can’t enjoy that many friendships.

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Chris Law, Aggregate Knowledge

• Your social network is a poor proxy for what you’re interested in.
• Your behavior is a good proxy for what you’re interested in.

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Sanjiv Das, Morgan Stanley

• Information is so important to us, and gives us so much proprietary advantage. “Open data” is scary to us.
• Data is going to be a commodity. get ready for it. The ORGANIZATION of that data may NOT be a commodity.  that’s interesting.

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David Cancel, Compete

• 2 million people being monitored
• 250-300K have the toolbar installed
• ISP’s are monitoring and licensing data to compete

Seth: This is granted deep in the EULA of the ISP?
David: Yes, just like its deep in the EULA of a credit card company.

Seth: How much do you pay an ISP?
David: For an ISP with millions of users, a million or so a month. [year?]

Seth: If I’m a comcast user, I’m worth about $.40/month for my entire clickstream
David: Yes. 10-12 folks buying this data, that I know of. (So you’re worth more than $.40!)

Seth: What percentage of us here are having our clickstream sold, would you guess?
David: 10%

Seth: Is the government buying this too?
David: Yes, I’m pretty sure they are.

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Dick Costolo, Feedburner

• Opening an API can have unplanned good consequences: Overnight we had a ton of new users from Spain. Someone there had used the Feedburner subscription count (obtained via the API) as part of a reputation/ranking algorithm, so now all the blogs were signing up to raise their stats. Now we probably won’t see a competitor come out of Spain.

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Scott Rafer – (formerly of) MyBlogLog

• People got into blogging to make new human connections, and somehow some part of our forebrain mistakes these little pixel collections for human connection.

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Seth Goldstein

• Imagine there is information about “Who is influential” … Who does that info belong to? To the people who are influential? To the people who calculated it?
• Alignment — if you pay attention enough, you start to align with someone. I hate how much I am influenced by Fred Wilson, but I pay attention to his stuff, so I am.

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Random Quotes and Exchanges

“The best guarantee for attention is living your life as openly as possible, expressing yourself as publicly as possible as early as possible.” – Goldhaber

??? – The Genie [of data collection] is out of the bottle, now its time to ask for the 3 wishes. We’ve gotta think carefully about what those 3 wishes should be.

Chris Law (Aggregate Knowledge): I wish AttentionTrust compliance was widespread…we don’t want to surprise people.
Steve Gilmore: This is bullshit.  Have you signed/endorsed the AttentionTrust principles?
Chris Law: No, we’re looking into it.

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