One of the hallmarks of successful network services today, such as the often-mentioned-in-this-space del.icio.us, Flickr or their respective equivalents, is a reliance on simple, straightforward metadata as a foundation for search, classification, retrieval, etc. <\/p>\n
A potentially unforeseen – and arguably more important – downstream impact of this proliferation of user\/automatically generated metadata might be the rise of what I’ve called in the past, “Personal Business Intelligence<\/a>” tools. The premise is absurdly simple: enterprise class tools essentially parse a wealth of corporate data and present it in some fashion – reporting, visually, or otherwise – to allow for identification of meaningful insights or observations. Their Personal counterparts would do the same, but with a different – and far less normalized, obviously – set of underlying data. <\/p>\n As consumers begin to accumulate metadata attached to their generated content – be it blogs, music, or photos, some interesting possibilities arrive for similar data mining. It’s intriguing, for example, to consider the possibility of a tool that can tell me – at a particular point in time – what I was thinking (via blogs), what I was reading (via bookmarks), where I was (via photos), who I was talking to (via email\/IM), and what I was listening to (via music observation). Or to imagine a service such as I proposed in the link above, that provides me with more sophisticated intelligence on one area – like bookmarks – as the very interesting Extisp.icio.us does<\/a>. In a sense, this is just extending the proactive rather than reactive use of metadata espoused by the Dashboard team<\/a>, among others. <\/p>\n This is powered, of course, by not only the observable nature of many of our digital behaviors today – but by the ability to persist that information indefinitely. <\/p>\n The questions are many, as are the potential abuses of such information. But simply with what’s available now – forgetting future innovations, this technically can be accomplished. <\/p>\n Key to a successful approach – in my mind – is not the technology. That could come from a variety of providers. Instead, it’s so-called soft-issues that I think will decide the winner, i.e. how open the interfaces are to allow for service substitution, and perhaps most importantly, the trust that potential solution providers have earned over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the hallmarks of successful network services today, such as the often-mentioned-in-this-space del.icio.us, Flickr or their respective equivalents, is a reliance on simple, straightforward metadata as a foundation for search, classification, retrieval, etc. A potentially unforeseen – and arguably more important – downstream impact of this proliferation of user\/automatically generated metadata might be the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends-observations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}