Chuck riffs off Zilla to talk about a personal cloud and what it may look like; at the moment so much of our personal informaton is dispersed across a variety of places, we do not have a cloud it's more like a mist or a general haze.
It's not just content such as photos, mp3s, blogs etc; it's also meta-data such as Amazon wish-lists, eBay purchase records, grocery shopping lists, my Linked-In contacts…information which describes our everyday lives, what we do and who we are.
I am in the process of scanning in the barcodes of all the books in our personal library and uploading them to LibraryThing; once those are in, you will probably be able to tell quite a lot about me. It might tell you more about me than my medical records but I probably don't mind you looking at what books I read but I would really object to my medical records becoming part of the public record.
What I need is a tool to help me manage all this information about myself. Some of which I am happy to be public knowledge, some which should always remain private.
Personal Information Management is a massively untapped area; how do we define the taxonomy of a life? And who are we going to trust to store this information, how are we going to ensure portability? These are complex things and I wonder who is going to solve them.
agree – big, big, big, scary area…
and one where people need to be very careful when reading T&Cs of PaaS & SaaS providers… It’s not just the information itself that’s of value, but also the pattern and taxonomy that’s of use. Lots of areas that people currently ignore that will rapidly merge between personal & work, public & private – all with long term consequences we don’t today understand.
There are good things in this – eg Amazon should buy LibraryThing or build there own, would help me a lot!
Martin
Sounds like you have an interesting business idea, but as you and Ian say, a complex puzzle to solve. I would say most of the bits of the puzzle exist, but it is working out how to put them together in a useable secure way, that is portable, flexible and can easily evolve as our currently poorly/undefined requirements evolve.
Effectively managing digital information is an immediate need for both organizations and individuals. It really comes down to being effective at the time it is created so that it is simpler to manage in storage. This is where the bulk of its existence will be and where it needs to be preserved for future use. Dealing with all this information requires a new paradigm; something beyond the simple folder hierarchy. Information needs to be organized in ways that are more intuitive with dynamic views of relative to content type, project-based, subject-based, etc. That is organized based on greater descriptive detail about the digital information. I’m a big proponent of object-based storage technologies and believe that at scale (millions/billions of files) it is optimally suited. An object orientation enables rich metadata to be stored with files allowing the content to be preserved with context. This provides customers with greater flexibility in managing their data. While it remains an emerging segment, I am evaluating a number of new entrants like Atmos, Caringo, DDN WOS, etc.