Many eyeballs are collectivist eyeballs

karentraviss links to a fascinating essay by Jaron Lanier (who I remember tanais interviewing, back in the day) about the problems with collectivism, including its new and shiny online face (wikis). It rewakes my continuing fear that one thing I value highly (the Internet) helped degrade another thing I value highly (an independant press that informed rather than entertained) and expresses very well my worry about open source (many eyeballs are shallow eyeballs; benevolent dictators make commercial successes). And then there's this:
"Google's vast servers and the Wikipedia are both mentioned frequently as being
the startup memory for Artificial Intelligences to come. Larry Page is quoted
via a link presented to me by popurls this morning (who knows if it's accurate)
as speculating that an AI might appear within Google within a few years. George
Dyson has wondered if such an entity already exists on the Net, perhaps perched
within Google. My point here is not to argue about the existence of Metaphysical
entities, but just to emphasize how premature and dangerous it is to lower the
expectations we hold for individual human intellects."
Or intellect in general. Bite-sized chunks of pre-digested information are not the way anything could learn to reason whislt developing the tools to do the reasoning from scratch. My old favourite the CYC project has spent I don't want to think how long developing an ontology; the semantic Web is no nearer than it was. All the wisdom in the world is not going to magically show up on a computer screen. Doesn't mean this Interweb thing isn't a marvellous resource, but let's not pretend it solves all the problems of human nature.

Web 2.0 is metadata

Why Web 2.0 will end your privacy
Are they investing in Web 2.0 sites because they're cool? Nope - because they can do contextual advertising. Which will be the next big thing; Microsoft's adCenter will allegedly detect your gender from your surfing habits and allow advertisers to deliver 'relevant' ads on the next page you visit.

But that's not quite all the answer. The VCs are investing because they all want whatever turns out to be the next Google: Google's VC had another 199 projects you've probably never heard of, and that was just in that 12 months. There's the me-too element and the 'new and shiny' bubble element. There's the fact that if you're under 21, 60+% of the content you look at online is generated by someone you know (news as entertainment rather than information again). Tim O'Reilly has been saying for a long time that the future of Web applications is metadata (Amazon ratings, flickr tags, digg 'dugs' and the rest), and that the smart companies get us to make the metadata for them.

And the other side of the coin is Identity 2.0, as it seems to be called. Add together the US laws on ID theft that mean companies have to disclose how many personal details they lose in laptop thefts, stolen backup tapes and good old-fashioned hacker break-ins, the post-SarbOx emphasis on compliance and regulation and the fact that the head of compliance is more likely to be on the board than the head of IT. Not many companies want the responsibility of keeping a lot of customer data unless it's sanitised and anonymised. Technology and privacy advocates are finally going in the same direction: put the user back in control of what data they disclose to a site and tell them where what they say is going (at least in the first instance). Over the next year or so we'll start seeing more ways to log in with tools like InfoCards that give you at the very least more of an idea about who is tracking what about you.