Doc Searls

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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 [...]

A fresh breath

This last year (2009) was the most challenging ever for me, both personally and professionally. Good times, tough problems, people that transformed my heart, and ideas that changed my perspective. It wasn’t always easy, but each challenge had its own reward.
I’m looking forward to writing a bit more this year, opening the conversation up about [...]

Ephemera and Permanence — Tweets for Life

Respectfully, Doc, I think you underestimate the value of the permatweet.
I’m still haunted by hearing that users get a maximum number Twitter postings (tweets) before the old ones scroll off. If true, it means Twitter is a whiteboard, made to be erased after awhile. The fact that few know what the deal is, exactly, also makes [...]

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 datastore 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 [...]

Farewell Google Notebook, Move over SearchWiki, We need a Search Map

Farewell Google Notebook, Move over SearchWiki, We need a Search Map

Alas, a noble experiment has been slayed by the relentless hand of corporate focus. Google has announced its web-clipping scrapbook Google Notebook will no longer be actively developed.
I’ve mentioned Google Notebook briefly in the past, as a tool for helping with user-driven searches (more) — or complex searches as I used to call them. Unfortunately, [...]

Towards User Driven Search

Towards User Driven Search

It is time to give users more control over Search.
At VRM2008 in Munich and at IIW in Mountain View, I started a conversation about User-Driven Search, the premise: what would it mean for users to truly drive their searches?
User-driven is a new term that came out of the VRM community riffing on the meaning of [...]

Answers to a few questions about VRM

Pignerol Antoine recently asked some questions about VRM and I thought I’d answer them publicly.
Is VRM really different from social CRM ?
Yes, although exactly how depends on how you define social CRM. Based on my understanding, I would suggest that VRM is first and foremost about providing value for the user with any vendor, as [...]

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 [...]