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Peter Bradwell

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Researcher

Peter Bradwell is a researcher at Demos. He is interested in digital identity, technology and the ways that information and knowledge is shared...

Posted by Peter Bradwell at 2:01pm on Monday, 23rd April 2007
I just found an interesting quote in a Wired interview with Tim O'Reilly.  It ties in really nicely with a lot of the work we are doing on information, and social software etc:

    "(there is) a major theme of web 2.0 that people haven't yet tweaked to. It's really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data. Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products -- fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is the authority for information about facts, but they're relatively undifferentiated.

Why did Google, for example, recently decide to offer free 411 service? I haven't talked to people at Google, but it's pretty clear to me why. It's because of speech recognition. It has nothing to do with 411 service, it has to do with getting a database of voices, so they don't have to license speech technology from Nuance or someone else. They want their own data stream."


It's interesting to think about the ways that web 2.0, which is usually thought of as being largely about giving people great tools to create, share and understand, might be rooted in some way in how organisations control - or host, compile, aggregate - large banks of data or information.  It's an idea Niamh and I are thinking about at the moment in the For Your Information project.

Comments

1
I think what's more interesting about that quote is that Tim O'Reilly finds it surprising or novel. It shows quite how over-excited he and his bay area friends have got (again) that the hard business imperatives driving all this investment only latterly rise to the surface. When he checks out of a hotel and is asked to fill in a customer survey form, what does he think is going on? A glorious democratisation of service industries, or a consumer profiling activity? Well, I suppose at a stretch you could say 'both'.  Of course these web 2.0 companies are collecting (and no doubt protecting) information, even the 'non-evil' ones. Maybe your research should look into how the line is drawn between your rights as a citizen-consumer-producer and the companies rights as an owner-controller-surveiller. For instance, apparently when 'citizen journalists' contribute content to CNN, CNN acquires and keeps all IP rights, and the citizen is left with any legal liability (ask Bill Thompson about this). I don't know, but I wonder how exactly delicious, lastfm and others would respond if you asked for them to give you and then delete everything they have on each user - I presume it would be more or less impossible.
Posted by Will Davies  at 2:27pm on Monday, 23rd April 2007
2

Even as the FT is predicting the wane of  'Bubble 2.0' I'm struck by the opposite - how little we realise the power of these participatory databases. Web 2.0 is clearly all about data. The only reason ‘users add value’ is because that content is used to create a unique data set that no one could replicate.

But what we don’t do is distinguish between the data that we voluntarily give and that which we unconsciously contribute every time we interact online. YouTube is famous for showing the first. Google does the second, and is a giant because of it. Will, I think you’re implying that even when we don’t know we’re giving away data on our behaviour, we’ll still want to own it. But right now, we don’t seem to care – giving it up is simply be the cost of getting a good service. Will there be a backlash? Not if we don't even realise that our privacy is being threatened.

Posted by Molly Webb  at 11:19am on Tuesday, 1st May 2007

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