
The Economist's blog: maybe we should make our data free? - ereldon
http://projectredstripe.com/blog/2007/04/04/oddly-economist-readers-like-data/
======
jganetsk
It's hard to categorically state whether data should be free or not. A great
book to read about this is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes
Everything (<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591841380/),> which describes many
cases of data being made free in order to elicit insight from the masses.

I think an interesting space, in particular, is those companies that distill
large amounts of data into small relevant sets. Google is the first example
that comes to mind, but search is not the only approach to this. Another
example is YC's own LikeBetter, who sneakily collected lots of training data
before launching this PAT thing. You can now figure exactly how your
individuality personality compares to thousands of others, based on these
millions of clicks they've receieved.

Are Google and LikeBetter making data free, or the opposite? There are trade
secrets involved there, but we might not consider that "data". You can see
interesting views and presentations derived from the data (search results, or
personality tests), but you can never see all the data at once... nor would
you want to.

------
inklesspen
You say "our data", but whose data is it? Remember the big furor there was
over AOL releasing search queries for some of their users, even after they
attempted to remove identifying marks? Many users of your site will think it's
"their" data, and depending on the legal/PR climate, they may be right.

