I’ve had too nice a day overall to spend too much time teasing out something truly new on the topics of where data lives, which data is your data, what formats are most future-proof, and which companies may or may not have found a path for data and formats which both serves people best and supports their business.
But over the past few days, I’ve read different and varied posts on these very topics… and I don’t think they are different topics, so it is worth the time to put all the ideas (with links) in one post for contemplation. I’m going to pluck sentences here and there, but most of these are worth reading in context and in full. The better posts are the length they are because they convey ideas with varying subtlety, not in pullquotes.
Data
I saw the Flickr API conversation via Michael Arrington, which was also the path to the “how-does-he-find-the-time?” comments of Thomas Hawk in the Flickr forums. This thread of the data and formats tapestry starts on whether an API must be open to competitors or not, but gets into fun territory with the conversation about whether tags (and other metadata) are owned by the tagger or the service…and whether’s there anything that can be done about it, practically. Folks even muse on extending the JPEG format (!) for a place to store this data.
Kudos to Stewart Butterfield for answering with respect, but not being pushed around, either, both in the Flickr thread (his home turf) and in the TechCrunch comments.
Today, Dave Winer adds “It’s the Users, Dummy,” banging a drum he’s hit before
The only criteria for winning that should be tolerated, by anyone, are features, performance and price. Lock-in is not an honorable or sustainable way to win.
Also on this sunny Saturday (in SF, don’t know about DC), Scott Karp pitched in with Data Storage Is the Key to the Web App Revolution, where he quotes a correspondence with Nick Carr about how enterprises already depend on external storage and applications (Salesforce.com is only the most prominent example, mentioned by Carr). Karp adds
On the consumer side, granted that most people would do better outsourcing the securing of their data, but perceived control, even at the expense of actual security, is also a powerful force.
I’d argue that perception is certainly shifting. Webmail is the thin end of the wedge on this issue: most people are content to believe their data is safe with one of the big webmail services out there. The “cloud” hasn’t let many down in the first decade of this type of service. I have to believe it’s getting better, not worse.
Formats
After switching away from Apple for the first time in 22 years, Mark Pilgrim explains why in “When the bough breaks“
I’m creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now.
He doesn’t trust the Mac to enable that future.
I’m thrilled to see Mark Pilgrim blogging again. No one combines incredible depth of knowledge with such crystallized attitude in every well-written sentence. I have no idea if he’s quite as formidable verbally as he is in writing, but damn!
John Gruber responded first with a quick note, and then with a lengthy essay to clarify: “And Oranges”
The hard part is deciding how much importance to give to each factor you care about. How much openness are you willing to give up for a system with a better interface?
(On a related note: John Gruber’s contribution to the fray is what prompted me to become a member, after reading him since the beginning. I don’t need full-text posts via RSS, but the Linked List feels worth $20.)
Pilgrim responds with “Juggling Oranges,” where he appreciates the thought put into Gruber’s essay, but notes that the larger point of data preservation is the point. ASCII text comes off looking brilliant, for reasons like this:
So if you care about long-term data preservation, your #1 goal should be to reduce the number of times you convert your data from one format to another.
I wonder what Mark Hurst thinks, and whether Creative Good still follows The Good Easy, which is not about formats, per se, but might reduce conversions. Of course, Hurst’s bit literacy would say… let those bits go. So maybe Mark Hurst and Mark Pilgrim aren’t quite on the same page here. But I digress.
Anyway…Tim Bray follows Pilgrim and Gruber’s exchange with “Time to Switch?,” where he answers his own question in the affirmative.
This feels like a crazy name-drop post, but it’s indicative of my reading habits, and given the relative prominence of all these folks in the tech blogging world, I’m sure I’m not alone in subscribing to all/most of these blogs, so I’m surprised no one has (ahem) mashed-up these two themes.
My effort here may be little better than the lines the boy draws when he connects the dots, but I absolutely feel this is all part of a larger conversation about control. Does controlling your data make you feel like you’re in control of your life? While I love that idea, it’s bound to be a false sense of security. It’s still stuff, even when it’s bits, not atoms.
Still, I admire those looking ahead, and I’ll continue to support the bleeding edge customers who help challenge companies to improve. I’d be curious to read my blog and look at my photos in 50 years, even if few others will.
Maybe someone else can put together a well-written essay on what it all means? I nominate Jarod Lanier, who enjoys wading in on hyped topics and knows how to write (e.g. Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, which is on a separate topic altogether). But anyone else is welcome to jump in.
N.B. Of course, all this from someone still struggling to back up their current computer, which has at least a decade of files transferred across as many as four Macs. Said files may or may not be in workable formats if I should ever try to open them once more. But I console myself with two facts: I still have them (until my hard drive befores my backup) and I haven’t touched most of them yet, so would my life (or anyone else’s) really be different if they did disappear?