Personal Data Store

Asymmetry by Choice

Perhaps the most powerful form of asymmetric information is missing from JP Rangaswami’s post addressing whether the web is making us dumber. I agree with the core point of JP’s article, but I think he oversimplifies the argument on asymmetry in a way that misses something important about the power of information.
JP defines four types [...]

Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing

Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing

The question of who owns our data on the Internet is a challenging problem. It can also be a  red herring, distracting us from building the next generation of online services.
The term “ownership” simply brings too much baggage from the physical world, suggesting a win-lose, us-verses-them mentality that retards the development of rich, powerful services [...]

One Night Stand worth $300 Million

In the ProjectVRM Standards Committee discussions, we’ve talked quite a bit about a “One Night Stand” use case, where a personal data store is used with an online retailer and all personal data is erased–as much as possible–after the transaction.

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Kynetx takes on Structured Browsing

Doc Searls recently brought my attention to a White Paper by Phil Windley, about his company, Kynetx. It does a good job explaining the thinking behind their architecture, and raises some questions that, for me, challenge some underlying assumptions and business choices.
Problem Domain
The distributed nature of the web is a big part of its [...]

R-cards “ah-hah!” at IIW

At last month’s Internet Identity Workshop and the subsequent DataSharing Summit, Markus S and Drummond Reed unpacked several ideas about r-cards, which, to a certain extent, are an evolution of the Information Card at the heart of CardSpace.
Going into IIW, I understood r-cards simply as a hybrid of InfoCard’s managed and personal card models. [...]

Running the Numbers

Running the Numbers

Bart Stevens recently suggested a breakdown on the potential economic impact of VRM, based largely on a post by Steve Rubel arguing that $1B is wasted in online advertising today.
First, I anticipate the Personal Data Store to become a design pattern that underlies other VRM services, rather than a service by itself. In fact, a [...]

NewsGang talks data portability. Next up: Service Portability.

NewsGang talks data portability. Next up: Service Portability.

Excellent chat today by Steve Gillmor, Chris Saad, Mary Hodder, Karoli Kuns, Robert W. Anderson, Matt Terenzio, and Bruce Lerner about data portability. They get to the nitty gritty about data portability, licensing, and social networks. Perhaps the best Gang I’ve ever heard.
So, Steve, if you’re listening, take this to the next level and talk [...]

The VRM Vector

The core of VRM, Vendor Relationship Management, is the vector of activity.

Remember vectors? Vectors are multi-dimensional, scalars one dimensional. In high school they explained it by saying velocity is a vector, it contains both the direction of travel and the magnitude. Speed, on the other hand, is a scalar. It only has the magnitude, direction [...]

The user is the platform of the future… Doc Searls @ LeWeb3

I love Doc Searls. Few people inspire the future as well as Doc, especially when he is on a tear. Here’s a delightful short (<5 min) romp in an interview at LeWeb3 in Paris about the future of the web and the critical importance of making user-centric open systems the core of a ubiquitously [...]

Credit Industry needs new integration paradigm… think VRM and Personal Data Stores

Slashdot brings us this article highlighting yet another picture-perfect case for the VRM Personal Data Store:
Technical Writing Geek writes with the news that the retail industry is getting mighty fed up over credit card company policies requiring them to store payment data. The National Retail Federation (NRF) has gone to bat for store owners, asking [...]