Sam: I don’t think you understand the impact that web is having on publishing and the media.
Advertising is not a sustainable business model. Murdoch admits MySpace isn’t hitting its revenue targets, Zuckerberg won’t even talk about Facebook’s. Both those sites have huge infrastructure costs, and their gross revenues are less than a dollar a month per active subscriber. You don’t work for free. You get services for free. That’s a huge transfer of value to you.

Incidefteri: I’m not aware of any data portability issues around fasting.

IMHO the answer is simply because the time and attention we spend on the web has VALUE to others (Advertisers) which thus far we have given away for free to services like Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, Google etc. which in turn has enabled the owners of these services to create vast WEALTH for themselves and their investors by selling it often without our permission.

In the past the industrial revolution resulted in the creation of factories which owners utilised to generate great wealth for themselves but in turn for the wealth creation they paid their workers for their time and labour.

Today the digital revolution has created “web factories” aka services such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube where we the labour generate great wealth for these new owners, except we do not get paid for our time/attention/creation because the services offered to us are FREE.

I would argue that we need to change this model/relationship so that we can AMORTISE OUR VALUE CREATION.

Basically I don’t want to work for free anymore and the only way to change this model is to take ownership of our data and then too offer our time/attention/creation (aka VALUE) to these services in exchange for a share of their advertising revenue or some other benefit. Free is no longer enough!

HOW can we do this? Firstly we need to control and store our own data (SimpleDB, SQLite). At the moment ownership of our data is fragmented and silo’d in services like Twitter, Flickr, Mybloglog, Youtube, Facebook etc which has created vast wealth for their owners because of the time and attention (labour) I gave away for free.

The second stage is to change the model by creating a bi-directional relationship with these services.

For example with Flickr I would register my personal details by SUBSCRIBING to Flickr. This would enable Flickr to get access to my personal datastore to upload the personal details I want them to have which they can then PUBLISH with my permission.

After that I could then let them have access to my social graph and finally in exchange for all of this valuable information Flickr would provide me with their photo sharing service.

Now if at anytime in the future I decide to UNSUBSCRIBE from Flickr I can do so unilaterally by closing my account and with it I disable Flickr’s access to my personal details, social graph and data by revoking my permission.

So HOW do I amortise my VALUE within my personal datastore?

The amortisation of the personal datastore occurs by web services agreeing to share their advertising revenue with me based on a percentage of the number hits/click throughs etc I bring to them.

So in the case of Flickr they could serve related advertising based on my attention (which I have given them access too)i.e this is Chris’s point, web services would have access to a fuller picture of my data.

So an advertising led FREE service would share a SMALL PERCENTAGE of its revenue with me. So I would no longer be working in a digital service for free. i.e the service that offered me the best return for my time/attention/creation would be the one I subscribed too and if a better offer came along I would be able to move – DP!

If however I simply wanted a ad-free service then I could still subscribe as above but instead I would be prepared to pay a fee in order to not see ads.

Bottomline the model today is wrong. I am continually subscribing to services and continually recreating my social graph and continually creating value for these services all for FREE.

Chris’ work on syncstream and apml is worth investigating further as this is in line wit this model change. http://www.faradaymedia.com/syncstream