Who owns (y)our data?

The panel I most wish I had been at the Web 2.0 Summit to see is the one on Open Data (see “Web 2.0 Confab Takes Aim at Closed Platforms” and “Google CEO Eric Schmidt: We Would Never Trap User Data“). In Marc Hedlund’s summary:

Whenever people talk about the new wave of web applications like Flickr and del.icio.us, the idea of users contributing their data to a pool of information on a site — photos on Flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us, and so on — always comes up. Open data is about the next step — what then? What happens to my information once I share it on a web site, and what can I do to control it?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since OSCON ’06 earlier this summer, where the issue was raised most clearly by Tim O’Reilly in one of the opening keynotes.

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One Sitemap Protocol to Bind Them All

(Via Techrcunch)

Google, MSN Microsoft Live Search, and Yahoo have all agreed to use the same sitemap protocol:

In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages. This should make it easier to get your pages indexed in a simple and standardized way. People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

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Old Media, meet New Media: Dan Rather to Keynote SXSW Interactive

SXSWorld, “the official magazine of the south by southwest conferences & festivals,” which is not apparently available online anywhere, but gets mailed to people registered for the conference, has an interview with Dan Rather conducted by Amanda Congdon (formerly of Rocketboom, now of Amanda Across America).

The interview outlines Rather’s accomplishments (coverage of Hurricane Katrina, MLK and the civil rights movement, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, 9/11, and interviews with Saddam Hussein) and his upcoming show on HDNet. That show, Dan Rather Reports, is presented as a kind of “return to his roots” – Rather will have full editorial and creative control.

No mention of Rathergate (where Rather undoubtedly learned quite a lot about blogs – but for more on that story its worth reading this article from the Columbia Journalism Review) or “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” – my favorite Rather pop-culture reference.
Unfortunately, other than the brief mention that Rather’s keynote will “discuss how emerging technology is reshaping the broadcast news media” there isn’t much of a taste of what he’ll talk about. Rather’s obviously immensely qualified to talk about the mainstream news media in the U.S., but his assertion that “When it comes to predicting the future, my crystal ball is permanently in the hockshop” I have to wonder what he’s got to say about emerging technology.

Your Employees Are Consumers Too: Enterprise IT and Consumer Applications

Ben Worthen at CIO magazine has been blogging about “consumer applications” in enterprise settings since at least last spring (see “I’m violating our corporate email policy . . . and I love it!” for an early example).

Now in the October 15th print edition, his colleague Susannah Patton has put together an examination of a number of cases in “Consumer Appeal.”
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Quality online is a lot like quality offline

The Fall 2006 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review includes an article titled “How Do Customers Judge Quality in an E-tailer?” (online full-text PDF is free to subscribers, otherwise $6.50).

When I read that the focus of the article was to answer the question “What are the specific aspects of an online transaction that customers value and use to distinguish one site from another?,” and that the authors had done a survey and some analysis I was intrigued.

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