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Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, Talis

The Attention Trust has come a long way since I sat in their launch session at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference, and followed up the interest I felt there by recording one of our earliest podcasts with their Executive Director at the time, Ed Batista.

Indeed, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s words at the 2006 Web 2.0 Summit could have been lifted right out of an Attention Trust manifesto;

“The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end-user, let them move it if they don’t like us, the better.”

As you might expect with an organisation that’s working to encourage responsible use and reuse of an individual’s click stream, the Attention Trust has turned it’s attention to the same Open Data topic that we’re addressing here at Talis with our work on the Talis Community Licence, our agitation, and a growing number of our actions.

Quoting from a blog post on the Attention Trust site,

“It is so easy to get excited about the latest Web 2.0 online media applications that we often lose sight of the fact that underneath all of these innovations is a fundamentally different kind of operating system, one based on open data as opposed to closed proprietary content. If I had to sum it up in a sentence:

Open Data is to media what Open Source is to technology.”

Exactly. The post continues;

“On Tuesday March 13, more than sixty inventors, investors and interpreters of online media will gather to discuss Open Data.”

That sounds interesting. We see Open Data cropping up more and more; in O’Reilly events; as a long-running theme at XTech (where I’m speaking on the topic this year); in media campaigns to ‘Free Our Data‘; and elsewhere. With some like-minded colleagues, we have an ‘open data’ panel proposal with W3C for this year’s Web conference, and should hear whether or not that’s been accepted any day now.

The locks placed upon the flow of data have long seemed unfair. Now it’s moved beyond ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’, and those same controls on data are beginning to present significant barriers to innovation, and to the delivery of the integrated and intelligent applications toward which so many of us strive.

Closed Data. Closed minds. Proprietary silos. Stagnation.

The ways of the past are a dead end, and the time has come to take a new path. It will be interesting to see whether or not the luminaries gathered “high above the congestion of locals and tourists on the city streets” in the Reuters building have the vision, the bravery and the will to blaze that trail.

Technorati Tags: attention, AttentionTrust, open data, Podcasting, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, Talking with Talis, Web 2.0