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VRM is starting to pick up steam just in time for IIW this week. For details, follow the links from Mine! and A nice unpacking of VRM. And thanks to Adriana Lukas, Eve Maler, Alec Muffett, Ben Laurie and Joe Andrieu (along with currently uncredited others) for getting many conversational as well as developmental box cars packed and rolling.
It’s great to see what I saw coming in 2003 finally start to take off.
I’ve long believed that the crossover from the Industrial Age to the Information Age will be marked by an awakening to the need by customers to control their own selves, rather than to remain subordinated to the controlling interests of companies. Same thing with citizens and governments.
Cluetrain, for me at least, was about that.
So now user freedom is at issue again, this time in the context of “social networking”, which in the current popular sense happens almost entirely inside company walled gardens. Some companies are larger than others, and some gardens have openings in their hedges for “federation” of user data, at the latter’s grace. But your data is still theirs, pretty much. That’s how it plays in the media, and probably in the minds of most of the companies involved as well.
So I just wrote about where I think this is going, in Who controls your data, over at Linux Journal. See what ya think.
