Steve Portigal tips us to this great piece on The Technium where Kevin Kelly riffs on the plummeting-to-zero cost of just about everything in the "new economy of abundance," and the attendant increase in value of metering each of those everythings. Hmm, maybe that wasn't so clear. Let's go to KK for the sweetspot:
I can get free email, free storage, free photo manipulation tools, free genealogical sharing, free phone service, free twittering, free...well almost free anything...knowing that the hosts are monitoring (metering) my usage.
Monitoring everything--all flows of materials, all flows of energy, all flows of people, all flows of attention--naturally creates rivers, if not oceans, of data about the flows of data. This flood of meta data is driven in part because the costs of bandwidth and computer cycles is itself "too cheap to meter." But in fact, meta data is too cheap NOT to meter--if we mean only to count and monitor it. The value of measuring the meta data of any bit seems to increase as the cost of the bit decreases.
At first glance there is a worry that an avalanche of data from all possible sensors, running 24/7/365 will simply drown us. What value can their be in saving every email, every web page EVER, every keystroke? One thing we've learned from radical self-trackers and life-bloggers is that while the value of ubiquitous monitoring seems nil at first, data streams of trivial actions are often the streams that become most valuable later on. Your night-to-night sleep patterns are worthless right now, but they might form an incredibly valuable baseline in the future if some emerging illness were to disturb them. Likewise in business, mass logs of ordinary customer behavior are now almost a hassle but might become the foundation for both new innovations and aids in discerning failures in future products and services.
Imagine a world were any set of historical data was available to you. Everyone has their own favorite data stream from history they would love to have. Such a trove would transform our lives. For that reason, monitoring everything will become commonplace. Cheaply metering data, in fact, is what propels the free economy. Metering is a type of attention. Products and services will be given away in exchange for the meta data about their use. Data about the free is now more valuable than the free thing itself.
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