The value of data

The recent robbery at the Verizon data centre in Kings Cross (Dec 7 2007) goes to prove that data is incredibly valuable. It’s hard to imagine only 20 years ago a full-scale robbery of what amounts to your name and address. Back then it was all about the gold, remember Brinks Mat?

The robbery was arranged by 6 men who were dressed in police uniforms. Having worked their way into the building they then tied up the staff and absconded with hardware. Apparently no data was taken but that is obviously what they were after and why? Because data is money. One of the clients with information held at the data centre was J P Morgan. This isn’t a tin pot robbery, it’s someone who appreciates the value of ripping off banks and individual identities on an international scale.

Robbery trends reflect value – pure and simple. A robbery of data on this scale brings home how economically important pure information is.  And if it’s this important surely we should be looking for the best ways to use and implement the data we have at our fingertips – whether it’s financial or not.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/kings_cross_data_centre_raid/

Tooling and Piping

Right, first post.

We’re using using Yahoo Pipes to filter in an RSS feed to the blog. You can find it here.

The nice, very nice thing about Yahoo Pipes is that it’s a pain free why to build applications using the thin client mentality. Completely web based in it’s approach, enabling you to suck in data, manipulate and pipe out again in various XML derivative forms – JSON, RSS, ATOM etc.

I’ve played with it lot since launch, mashin’ feeds to create media mash up productions, like Crazy, but I’ve not really used it to inspect data. You see, the tools we use to build digital products never allow us to see the value in the bits. Developers and engineeers working with Assembler will because that level of development thrives on optimisation wheras working with data in a spreadsheet encourages a causual approach to evaluation. Why? Because an application, when coding, has to be compiled – the language and syntax must be correct for the software to be constructed. Running any qualative or financial data through a spreadsheet will dumbly give you an answer.

OK – an error message in a compiler may give you a dumb response, but the ability to parse or not is one way to look how data is used. When the brain is parsing data (“Does that look right?”) versus a compiler (“Computer says no!”) we enter a understanding the relationship between the symboloic and the emotional values that exist with Bit generation and Bit interpretation.

Being able to connect with data and work with it’s properties requires, perhaps an open mind, not open values of the data. Data should be used to show us patterns, emotions, human traces that we can not see through any other human activity. Data is not valgue – it symbolically holds a value. It’s the relationship between Bits that enagage not the symbol that value defines.

Data needs to travel, to move, to be, for us to see, imagine and rely on it’s values. Data needs to breathe.

Data can not protect our thinking nor confirm our thinking. Its role is to enable a conversation between the person and the system.

And that’s what YahooPipes exploits: RSS is free flowing data – not in a bit shifting affordance, but in its distribution and thus its brilliance to be justaposed with other data.