Excuse me for a moment while I indulge in a bit of stating the obvious, but I’ve just had one of those moments where I stand back, look at stuff, and say “oh. wow.”

We’ve come a long way on the internet in the past 2 years. So far so fast, in fact, that when you’re living in the centre of it all and incrementally immersing yourself in it, it becomes easy to forget where you came from.

I was thinking along these lines because I was just tinkering with my account on Upcoming.org, adding a new event to the database and subscribing to some others. Having added the event in question, I linked in a freely-available mp3 by one of the bands. That done, I finally got around to adding the feed of my events on upcoming.org to my iCal calendar on my mac. And then I tagged some Flickr photos from Hack Day so that they show up in the event’s entry on upcoming.org…

In less than 10 minutes, I’d told the world about an imminent concert, filled my personal, portable calendar with events which I’ll want to attend, and shown people another angle of an event which happened last week. And none of this required any complex scripts, hours of screen-scraping or data-munging. It was all accomplished with a couple of clicks and a little bit of typing.

Another example; this morning’s blogosphere-darling, Rentometer, which takes your location and self-disclosed rent, and plots it against all the other entered data for your area. It’s nice to know that my apartment is reasonably priced, and it wouldn’t be at all possible without a simple site powered, crucially, by freely addressable mapping systems.

We didn’t have this three years ago. And it’s been coming in leaps and bounds and tiny steps, but today is the first day I really stopped for a second and let myself realise how rich and complex the network of freely-transportable data (and the APIs which support its transfer) has become, and how much cool stuff is starting to come out of it…

Which only leaves one caveat.

“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. … That tension will not go away”

So runs (as Wikipedia freely tells me) the condensed version of the geek crowd’s favoured soundbite. At present, the services which are driving the free data bonanza are, more or less, free to participate in and to use. So far, we’ve really just been exploring what’s possible, and reveling in that. Longer term, I’m not sure that many people have worked out how to make this economy pay on a large scale – and in terms of investors, programmers, bandwidth and computing power, someone somewhere always needs paying.

It’s cool what we’ve accomplished so far. The next step is ensuring that we can continue to accomplish it without a 2000-style collapse of the data economy, or a sudden dramatic increase in the cost of participation.

Now there’s a “hack” that’ll make someone a lot of money.

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 7:13 pm .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: Geeking, Trends and culture.
Supernerds with RSS readers will probably wet their pants over the RSS 2.0 feed.
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There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).