Maybe. But I think GM’s decisions does illustrate a key problem for Facebook and Twitter – the revenue model. Social Media grew up without dependencies on ad-based revenue. On Facebook, you aren’t a customer. You are a product, and its your likes, dislikes, friends, photos, videos, and content that generate value. Selling products to products via advertising is hard. Members don’t use Social Media to go shopping. There’s no commerce platform there. They use it to be social. There are so many other outlets that are more effective for advertising than Social Media.

So how should Facebook and Twitter make money? My idea: make it collective. The value is in the data.

1. Make terms and conditions explicit that every member owns their own data via copyright. This does two positive things.

A. It indemnifies Facebook and Twitter for the crazy, infringing, and potentially libelous posts of their members by allowing them to claim that they are conduits of content rather than publishers or distributors.

B. Copyright establishes the rights to royalties for content created and posted on their networks, which enables the next step.

2. Allow members to opt-in to Big Data analysis by Social Media partners and intermediaries.

3. Charge Social Media for Big Data Searches by data volume.

4. Pay members royalties every time their data is used in Big Data Searches.

This simple model creates powerful incentives that transform user members from products into mutual social network content providers with an economic interest in posting content that will be used in Big Data searches. It establishes data property rights that insulate Facebook and Twitter from vouching for the content on their networks. Members will also discover that providing high quality data that companies want to search for means more royalties and so the system will produce better behaviors. And it creates a 2-tier royalty distribution model that will also pay Facebook and Twitter handsome revenue that will change online advertising and make every other content aggregater change too.

Of course, Facebook and Twitter will have to sort our who’s a person and who’s a bot, and will have to provide content creation tutorials to help users/customers create content that has value by sharing the top 100 Big Data queries and sample results.

But this Business Model has something for everyone and is a true win:win. It benefits customers by establishing data property rights and royalties for content. It benefits organizations who want to do Big Data searches by providing ever richer data streams of high quality and availability. And it benefits Facebook, Twitter, and their investors by providing an enormous profit making engine selling Data.

The Data is the Value. The more there is, the more valuable it becomes. Pay your customers to create higher quality data and charge your partners to use it. Its a simple Business Model.

Dick Costolo – @dickc – and Mark Zuckerberg – @finkd – are you listening?

“What is this Big Data thing? It feels so new and overwhelming. How can I get my arms around it?”

I guess a lot of people feel this way these days. I sure did for a long time, but here are some things I learned about Big Data; and more importantly how I learned it. Big Data isn’t just lots of data in big data warehouses. Its about distributing lots of data warehouses across lots of database servers who each have a dedicated purpose to analyze that data in parallel processing and provide results faster than any one server could in the same amount of time. That extra power gives organizations the ability to analyze massive amounts of information that heretofore just wasn’t possible. Of course there are lots of IBMers who can explain Big Data better than I can, but what I’m interested in is not so much the technological landscape of Big Data but how organizations are doing it – the use cases.

Lately, in the Information Governance Community, we’ve been exploring Big Data Governance Use Cases via teleconferences with members. The use case examples from companies like IDC and Sabre are helping us to understand implementation patterns, opportunities and challenges, as well as anxieties and cultural opposition. We’re taking what we learn and encoding it into a new Big Data Category in the Information Governance Maturity Model. Its an opportunity for many thousands of Community members to contribute small amounts of observed behavior and see those contributions woven into a far larger fabric of Community Insight.

But we shouldn’t just learn from each other. We should also take in what others are doing outside our Community. Because there is a lot of good work being done with Big Data all over the world. Here are a few examples I’ve come across:

Price Discovery outside of Markets. In a blog post two years ago, I remarked how 60% of all equity trades today are done in what are called Dark Pools. Dark Pools are the result of bi-lateral contract agreements between buyers and sellers who consummate transactions outside the boundaries of market exchanges. They use markets like NYSE for price discovery, but execute their own transactions. This is the result of the growing sophistication of technological trading platforms that allow buyers and sellers to find each other without needing to be members of a market. That’s an important development but markets are still essential to discover the going price of things folks want to buy.

But Big Data can change that too. In this example, some folks used Big Data to study “Rice” and “Price” in Twitter streams from Indonesia. They found that doing this long enough allowed them to discover the market price of rice without using a commodity market. These people are using publically available data to do price discovery in real time that is far cheaper and faster than market based discovery.

That’s a revolution.

When businesses, governments, and private citizens can use Big Data technology to analyze massive streams of publicly available information to divine market prices, understand trends, and digest relationships, many existing economic models of value creation will fall – market research, publishing, proprietary trading, consulting. Any field dependent on specialized knowledge can be endangered by super fast data analysis on massive streams from disparate sources.

On April 27, the Information Governance Community will continue the discussion of Big Data Use Cases. I’ll update my blog every week with new ones I find. Bring yours as well. We need all the use cases we can find to inform our discussion and refine our understanding. And join the Community. Its the largest, most vibrant, and active of its kind in the data management world. And its free and welcoming.

www.infogovcommunity.com

We all do. And in that context, we are all Big Data users and abusers, and we can identify with larger enterprises that are also confronting vast streams of information from every corner of the globe, created by individuals, communities, corporations, and governments. We as individuals never had industrial data management applications. We never had Data Governance Councils, Stewards, or Data Management professionals. So we’ve been selecting data streams first and using the ultimate analytical engine – our brains – to integrate that information, glean trends, and make decisions.

What’s new about Big Data is that large enterprises are copying the information processes that We The People use every day. They are selecting streams first, aggregating them second, determining application third, making decisions fourth. Judging consequences of decisions… later, if at all. Organizations around the world are deciding to retain information much longer because there is a belief that latent, slow developing, trends may lie dormant in that information that can be discovered much later.

But with vast volumes of information, long retention cycles, high velocity decision-making has the potential to do enormous damage as much as enormous good. And we know from experience, that decision-making is often influenced by cyclical trends, personal prejudice, and national dogma. Counter-Cyclical views can be marginalized. Whistle-blowers can be fired.

But Big Data also offers an historic opportunity for Data Management. This industry for too long has been seen as back-office archivists recording the deeds and attributes of heroic business leadership in dingy databases in large glass-house mainframes and data warehouses. They have taken back seats to application developers and business analysts who first and foremost collect the requirements of business users for new applications, features, and functions.

But Big Data changes all of that. It makes information sources and streams more important than applications, features, and functions. It changes the emphasis in value creation and puts the onus on Information Management to produce better sources and streams, easier aggregation and integration, manufacturing information products any user can leverage in any application they wish.

Its large enterprises automating the way We The People use online information every day, and the power and consequences of this paradigm shift are profound and potentially quite scary.

We need Information Governance over every part of Big Data to assure that organizations can answer these fundamental questions:

1. Can we trust our sources?

2. Do we know where they came from?

3. How do we verify the authenticity of the information?

4. Can we verify how the information will be used?

5. What decision options do we have?

6. What is the context for each decision?

7. Can we simulate the decisions and understand the consequences?

8. Will we record the consequences and use that information to improve our Big Data information gathering, context, analysis, and decision-making processes?

9. How will we protect all of our sources, our processes, and our decisions from theft and corruption?

10. (via David Bartholomew) When an error or exception is discovered how do we recover without incurring massive work re-engineering our streams, integration, analysis, and decision-making automation?

This morning, the Information Governance Community began discussing these issues in a global teleconference moderated by IDC. We have just scratched the surface of these issues and have much more to discuss. We have agreed to create a new category – Big Data – in our Maturity Model to provide organizations with new methods to benchmark their Big Data Governance maturity. But we also agreed that our existing Maturity Model categories also apply and we need to update them to include Big Data issues and questions.

I believe this is critical work. Big Data is an enormous opportunity to make information the arbiter of value creation in the Information Age. But it is also an enormous risk because the same solutions can be used to make dangerous and destructive decision-making a high volume, high velocity science.

Every new technology can be used for both good and evil. Join the Information Governance Community to help ensure Big Data serves the best possible uses.

Today, most Social Media has less “social” content and a lot more corporate content.  What I found fun about Facebook in the beginning was the opportunity to discover people around the world who had interests similar to mine who I might otherwise never meet.  It gave me an unfiltered way of discovering ideas and opinions.  But today, Facebook is flooded with corporate advertising.  Advertising isn’t social – its corporate.  And corporatism invades every other part of our lives.  In America, shopping is already a predominate pastime and recreational activity.  I want my social life to be social.  But its a free country – still – and Facebook is free to go and get an IPO and transform itself into a new fangled Old Media Platform with the word “Social” in it.

But I want to be Social online with other social people who think of themselves as friends in an open-source standards based environment.  I don’t want to be a customer or a product of a company when I interact with my family and friends.  I don’t want my ideas data mined and mis-interpreted by ad agencies, corporate sponsors, media tracking entities, and national security organizations.

Look, it always was dangerous to post your ideas online.  A spouse, friend, family member or employer could always misinterpret what you said online and hold you accountable.  Trolling and stalking online could get you arrested.  But none of those outcomes compare to the jurisdictional nightmares that await tourists and travelers who have their tweets misinterpreted by nation-states they may visit.  Jail, deportation, and other dreaded outcomes await those who think their tweets defend freedom when less free places read them.  And btw, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist and there is already enough evidence of Thought Crime prosecutions from tweets and rants posted online to make every Social Citizen take note, be very alarmed, and more circumspect about what they tweet or post.

We the people need a Social Bill of Rights.

- To protect our rights to think out loud on-line and off, to write our ideas, argue with those who disagree.

- To be social when we want to be.

- To tell corporate interests to bugger off and leave us alone when we don’t want to be sold to.

- To have self-determination over our own data – its quality, availability, and deletion.

- To be free to speak and learn anywhere in the world, on-line and off, without fear of penalty, prosecution, or incarceration.  You are not free if you cannot speak and learn without injury.

- To have all these rights respected and protected through international treaty.

When these rights are provided to every human being in every nation, Social media will be social again and safe.

Right now, its swim at your own risk and I’m choosing to stay dry.

The weather in DC was glorious.  I hardly noticed how warm it was in the cab from the airport as we rushed through half-empty noontime streets.  But after lunch, as I walked to my next meeting I noticed how many students were sitting on the grass in parks in T-shirts and jeans.  It was 68 degrees Fahrenheit on January 31, 2012.  Next to the students was a long line of homeless people picking up sandwich lunches that a local church was giving out.  The homeless far outnumbered the students, a grim reminder on a perfect day that many have lives far from perfect just a few blocks from the White House.

In the midst of this contrast, my wife called to ask if I had seen the USA Today article (http://tinyurl.com/78r2z2c) about the two British tourists who had been deported in LAX because of two joke tweets they had written on Twitter.  I hadn’t and didn’t know what she was talking about so she texted me the URL.  Two young British citizens in the mid-twenties had used British slang to describe how excited they were to travel to Los Angeles and party for three weeks and the US Department of Homeland Security, who apparently monitor all Twitter messages, interpreted that vernacular to be a potential threat to the United States.  The two were apprehended at Passport Control as they arrived, handcuffed, interrogated for 5 hours, locked up overnight in an immigrant holding cell, and promptly deported in the morning.

The offending tweets?

“3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p*ssing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!” (posted Jan. 3)

“Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?” (posted Jan. 16)

Its unclear from the press accounts if the two have a criminal record in the UK, or any other incriminating evidence linking them to terrorist organizations.  One is a pub owner, the other his girlfriend.  The tweets are a tad sloppy perhaps, but when did sloppy tweets become a reason for imprisonment and deportation?  “Destroy” is apparently British Slang for binge drinking, and diggin up Marilyn Monroe is another vernacular party reference.  Of course, Tweets are very short, and people cram all kinds of quarter-thoughts into them in non-nonsensical strings of thoughts meant not to be “sentences” but gibes and jokes, references, and innuendo.  Its shorthand for friends, comments for fans, staccato blabber.

In America, we like to think of ourselves as intrinsically good.  We have a constitution, a Bill of Rights, and believe in the rule of law.  We hold that people are innocent until proven guilty – of crimes they actually commit or plan to commit.  In our Constitution, we have an Amendment which defines the right to the Freedom of Speech.  It reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Twitter is speech.  People who write on twitter assemble publicly. That speech is protected by the first Amendment.  Writing is the articulation of Thought.  It is not a crime to think bad thoughts and write them down.  It is a crime to act on bad thoughts written down: to actively plan, conspire, or commit illegal acts.

But when one State monitors thoughts written down, in 140 characters or less, and uses that information to deprive people of their rights, without due process, that heinous example will be copied by other States and no one is safe from the Tyranny of staccato-blabber-incrimination anywhere.

It was at that moment, in the park, between the students and the homeless, on an unbelievably beautiful Washington Day, that I realized how much the world had changed and hard it would be to ever go back to the pre-Twitter days when the Internet was free, speech was protected, and the prosecution of Thought Crimes was an ancient Cold War nightmare or more recent Hollywood fable.

Now, of course, the two British Tweens in Los Angeles are not American Citizens protected by the American Constitution.  They have no rights under the First Amendment.  Those rights are only provided to American Citizens.  So, DHS was within the law in deciding to deport them.  But woe be to all of us for the precedent this sets.

The world is inter-connected.  Every idea is copied.  When the United States of America uses technology to monitor the thoughts of people in its country or visiting its country, that example will be copied.  Other Nation States with their own interpretations of Twitter will decide if Americans visiting their Nation have committed Thought Crimes against their State and the penalties could be much more severe.

You could be arriving in Shanghai on business, when Chinese immigration officials stop you at passport control to inquire about the Tweet you wrote in 2008 on the Anniversary of Tienanmen Square.  Or you could be en route to Israel via Kiev, when Ukranian border police imprison you over a Facebook post you wrote commenting on an unflattering cartoon of their President.  Or you could be vacationing in Victoria Falls, when Zanu-PF police arrest you in your hotel because you participated in Skype conversations with a Zimbabwean friend who lives in South Africa and often blogs against the Mugabe regime.

There are no international treaties protecting Tweets, Faces, or Skypes.  What you write and say online can and will be used against you.  And the rules will be arbitrary, the punishments potentially quite severe.  And every Nation will assert their own jurisdiction to protect the power of Governance over the extremely threatening ability of individuals to use technology to communicate, share ideas, and self-organize purposes not orchestrated by the Nation.

I walked the streets in a daze.  Everything seemed different, tainted with the knowledge that every idea in every persons head that I passed could be written on twitter and misinterpreted.  A few minutes later, I was in the office talking with some colleagues and mentioned this story to a friend.  He doesn’t travel much and didn’t feel directly threatened by the story.  “It could have been a couple of inexperienced DHS officers… and Los Angeles is a strange place anyway” he said.  I asked if he had a Twitter account, Facebook, etc, and was at all concerned about what he wrote with those tools.  Yes to the accounts, no concern.

“I don’t care if they watch me, I don’t do anything wrong.”

That’s what young American idealists said in the 1930′s when they attended Socialist rallies during the Great Depression when it seemed Capitalism had failed and the nation was hungry for new ideas.  Twenty years later, those people were hunted down, put on Black Lists, monitored, humiliated in Congressional hearings, and deprived of their ability to work in many professions.  These days, it would only take twenty minutes for a video camera or text search monitor to find what you wrote, said, or did and hold you accountable.  Maybe you belong to a Union in Ohio or Minnesota, with an active Governor campaigning against Unions?  Maybe you subscribe to the Occupy Movement Facebook page?  Maybe you joined the Tea Party and Tweet about Conservative ideas?

Maybe you are a libertarian and bemoan the loss of Civil Rights in blog articles.

The technology to monitor what you say and do is trivial today, and thanks to two unlucky British tourists in Los Angeles we all know it is being used.  Any idea written down on the Internet CAN be monitored and interpreted by a State anywhere in the world with the right to imprison or kill you, your family, and all your friends on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

This isn’t 1984.  This is 2012 and these are the last days of Internet Freedom.  Mark my words.  EVERYTHING has changed.

Introduction to MIKE2

The movement toward pervasive business intelligence (BI) is driving IT and business leaders to realize the importance of establishing a comprehensive data governance strategy to ensure the quality, accuracy and protection of an organization’s most valuable asset. With more and more users demanding direct access to trusted and accurate data, the need for a holistic approach to managing and leveraging information for maximum gain has never been greater.

Attend our upcoming Information Integration and Governance Forum to learn the essential policies, processes and organizational structures required to build an effective framework to govern your organization’s data throughout its lifecycle.

If Media acts like a propoganda arm of the US Government to disseminate mis-information about events abroad, how much mis-information is disseminated about events at home?

For example, Banks have bad data quality in their branch operations.  A traditional IT approach to this problem would be to inspect the data to understand the incidences of bad data quality and trace the lineage to discover its origins.  A systemic approach would be to see bad data quality in the larger context of a banking data system and to try to understand why does a Bank have branches, why do branches produce data, how do the branches interact with data, and why is it sometimes bad?  The two approaches might arrive at similar conclusions, but not always solve the same problems.

I’ve been a fan of systems thinking for many years.  Its a fascinating way of seeing the world that is, unfortunately, hampered by its own complexity.  It’s taken humanity thousands of years to get accustomed to communicating cause and effect.  You probably remember when you learned cause and effect in high school or college.  It still has to be taught.  And the fact is that for most of the history of civilisation, cause and effect could describe most interactions, problems, and solutions.  In 1804, there were 1 billion people on the planet.  It took another 120 years to reach 2 billion, and by 1974 that doubled to 4.  Today, were at 7, and by 2046 it will be 9 billion.  Large numbers of people create ever larger systems of use and interaction whose complexity itself requires new ways of thinking to comprehend far more correlations than simple cause and effect.

Few people have understood or articulated these issues as well as Russell Ackoff (1919-2009).  I am sorry I didn’t meet him while he was alive, but many of his wonderful speeches and ideas are recorded online.  Take 10 minutes to get to know him.  Its really worth it.