ndanger.organism

(Here’s one from the vaults: I started writing this July 2007)

I like Reg, so I was surprised when I thought he wanted comments on his site instead of aggregators.

It turns out I misinterpreted his post. He responded to my comment:

…But yes, I do think comments on reddit and most especially links in social bookmarking sites break the web by placing them in someone’s proprietary database, instead of on the web itself…

But what happens if del.icio.us publishes a new EULA and shuts their API down? Suddenly, it’s as if all the links, all the intelligence, was locked in a box.

With “bloggers,” each individual has a lot of power over a very small part of the web, but no one entity has a lot of power over a lot of the web.

Social bookmarking sites concentrate that value in a few hands. You may not trust me. But you can trust bloggers in aggregate, and the web as a whole.

<3ing on Walmart

As long as marketing and advertising fund the web, information will be the currency (well, “attention” I guess, but information is the attractor). In an information economy, Reg is arguing against Walmart: why support a censor-loving union-busting monarchy instead of that quaint local shop?

Altruism is great, but sometimes Walmart is just easier. Gabe da Silveira nails it:

Regarding the concentration of power, that’s just an economic requirement. Most users can’t create their own websites, or run their own servers, much less write their own software.

Even if you can create your own website there are benefits to scale, not the least of which is PageRank. And used properly, an aggregator can raise all ships: the author reaches a wider audience, commenters get single sign-on and response tracking, and reddit gets content for their hungry eyeballs.

A third way

Unlike money, information is inexhaustible. Less pretentiously: why not copy the reddit comments onto your own site? Simply 1) query reddit for your stories URL 2) if found, screen-scrape comments and 3) add them to your own blog. Realistically: reddit has no API (despite the request), the HTML isn’t easily scrapable and, of course, there could–IANAL–be legal concerns.

But not all site are the same: del.icio.us and digg both have API’s and Flickr has made switching services easier by granting API keys to its competitors.

Reg points out that an API can be nullified with the flick of an EULA. A site could also disable their API or start blocking IP’s, but it’s unlikely. Economics cuts both ways: large sites grow larger by using their scale to provide value; large sites become small sites by pissing off their customers. The easiest way to piss customers is by having an inferior product. Open data isn’t as important to most people, but it will be once enough people get burned.

Interoperability is important to a specific group, namely developers. Check the furor over AppEngine. The business case for an API is that a thriving ecosystem provides the best sort of lock-in: happy customers. If restrictive policies drive away the builders of said ecosystem, why bother having an API at all? (Counterpoint: the internet swelled over the idea of coding to a closed platform. I wonder what will happen when Android phones show up?)

A monopoly would change everything. This is both worrying and… er, not worrying: closed data could be the new lock-in or maybe the internet’s low barrier to entry will keep facilitating innovation (and in turn defection).

Vote with your bits

If you care about open data there are several things you can do. In roughly descending order of difficulty: pass an open-data law, write data liberation programs (like the reddit comment-crawler) or use the meme-sharing power of the internet to organize (see: Creative Labs).

Those all require skill, or at least initiative. At the bottom of the hierarchy is the simplest: vote with your bits. In this light, Reg’s post (and those of the EFF, Larry Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Mark Pilgrim and others) form like Voltron into a digital Ralph Nader, educating the online community so we can all invest our information wisely.