Posts tagged as "ownership"

Big (Location) Data vs. My (Location) Data

For a pleasant change, the guts of this talk didn't metamorphose oddly during the writing. Instead, it geolocated. This was originally planned to be my keynote talk at Social-Loco in San Francisco last month. But I wasn't able to make it to the Bay Area as planned for reasons too complex to go into here. Suffice to say, the slide deck languished unloved on my laptops hard drive, taking up 30 odd MB of storage and not really going anywhere.

Then I got an email from Stuart Mitchell at Geodigital asking me if I'd like to talk at the AGI's Northern Conference and thus, after a brief bit of editing to remove the conspicuous Silicon Valley references, this talk relocated from San Francisco to Manchester. As per usual, the slide deck plus notes are below.

The Delicious Debacle And My Dependence On The Cloud

About 6 months ago, when I announced that after 4 years I was leaving Yahoo! to join Nokia I wrote ...

So whilst I’m going to Nokia, I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

That's still true but the recent news of the closure, or shutting down, or selling off of Delicious has been one of those significant events that makes you sit up and take notice. In this case, it's made me take notice of just how much I rely on the vague and nebulous technology we call the Cloud.

Geographic and Transport Data; a Tale of Capricousness, Whimsy and Downright Insanity

The industry I work in thrives on data; we consume loads of the stuff and in turn we generate petabytes of it. I'm talking about data in general, not the geographic, mapping or place data that I usually write about.But the longer I work in the Internet industry the more convinced I become that, as an industry, we need to get our act together. How else to explain the bizarre, rapidly changing and capricious nature of how we gain access to, use, pay, don't pay and disseminate data?We're socially conditioned to assume that free does not equate to good, hence the adage "there's no such thing as a free lunch". So stuff that costs is good and stuff that's free isn't. But normal rules don't apply here.