(Not really Futurework but may be of interest nevertheless... The blogpost that I did that is referenced in the very thoughtful article/blog below has had an interesting lifecycle over the last few days.
The normal traffic on my blog is in a modest but acceptable 20 hits a day range going up to 80 or so when there is a new blogpost... The new blogpost generated about 65 hits the day it came out, 135 the following day (Friday), 144 on Saturday, 132 on Sunday and about 80 up until noon yesterday morning. I didn't check the counter from around noon to 2.00 pm when to my astonishment it had jumped by roughly 500 during the period and was going up at the rate of roughly 200 hits an hour (and is still going up at that rate -- now approaching 4000 hits! (the hits are coming in so fast that the counter has started to act up in some peculiar ways... I couldn't figure out what was going on until I started to check where the hits were coming from... The blogpost was tweeted at roughly 12.00 pm PDT by Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Publishers and among other things the originator of the web 2.0 terminology), no idea how he glommed on to it but he has roughly 1.5 million followers on Twitter... https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/23179898934 The post has now been reposted as per the below and this one in particular is both interesting in itself and has generated a number of quite interesting and useful comments. (now back to obscurity ;-). Mike -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nicholas Roberts Sent: Monday, September 06, 2010 7:19 PM To: Peer-To-Peer Research List Subject: [p2p-research] Empoering the Empowered or Public Data for Everyone How Open <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/when_open_data_is_bad.php> Data is Used Against the Poor By Marshall <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/author/marshall-kirkpatrick.php> Kirkpatrick / September 6, 2010 4:07 PM / 3 <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/when_open_data_is_bad.php#comments> Comments 2 michaelgurstein%20 <http://readwriteweb.com/images/michaelgurstein_-20100906-162121.jpg> Open data is all the rage these days, but is simply opening up aggregate public information for outside analysis enough to change the world for the better? A new article by Mike Gurstein, Editor of the influential Journal of Community Informatics <http://ci-journal.net/> , argues that open data may merely make the rich richer and the poor poorer, unless the "open access" paradigm is extended with what he calls "effective use." Here at ReadWriteWeb, we often write about the potential for innovation created by aggregate online and public data. Leading technology publisher Tim O'Reilly is a big, open data proponent as well (his newest conference is all about big data <http://strataconf.com/strata2011> ), but he called Gurstein's article a "sobering account of how open data is used against the poor..." "We need to think deeply about the future," O'Reilly said <https://twitter.com/timoreilly> this afternoon. Here's a long excerpt from Gurstein's post, Open <http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/open-data-empowering-the-empowered -or-effective-data-use-for-everyone/> Data: Empowering the Empowered or Effective Data Use for Everyone? ..... In a sector of the economy as dominated by political Libertarianism as web technology is, the idea that opening up platforms of data for innovation needs to include consideration of the unequal circumstances of potential consumers of that data is unlikely to be a popular argument. We tend to believe that the web and data are meritocracies, where anyone with enough motivation can create value and the tide will rise, raising all ships. Maybe that's not the case, though. Maybe data as a platform needs to be presented to society with the same care that technical providers of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) take in serving up their connection to a would-be community of independent developers. You want people to use your data? Then pay attention to what they need. Similarly, if you want all parts of society to benefit from the opening of public data, then simply opening it up and allowing the most ferociously competitive people in society to grab a hold of it may not be a good way to impact the world positively. <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/when_open_data_is_bad.php> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/when_open_data_is_bad.php ReadWriteWeb -- Nicholas Roberts US 310 402 3513 http://Permaculture.TV http://permaculture.coop
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