Where’s my data - I don’t care, just let me use the service!

July 13th, 2006

Should educational institutions be using/relying on commercial, centrally hosted, solutions?

While it is true that the range of commercial offerings are very useful, attractive and slick - is there an argument for maintaining control over the system you use, especially given one, current, revenue model - selling user data and habits to advertising and marketing companies?

MySpace

“Myspace, News Corp says, could drive traffic to Fox Interactive Media. And most importantly, Myspace has detailed logs of its users’ preferences, online behaviour and personal information.

That could help the company tailor what it does to the ever-more-discerning market which Mr Murdoch believes he has identified.”

Source: What Myspace means to Murdoch - BBC
Further reading: MySpace is the most expensive data mining project in the world
Using MySpace: Virtual Presence

Facebook

At one UK Univerisity some students commented on a proposal to launch a student space:

“What about a ‘facebook’ community as in many other universities? this facebook system has been very successful in many other unis e.g. LSE, Imperial etc”

“I think facebook is a better options as it makes it easier for other people to find you. This option means people have to go out of their way to find your profile. Why not join part of a larger community? “There is no point in re-inventing the wheel!”"

Then we look at what one of the new investors in Facebook says:

“We think Facebook has a unique opportunity to reach a crucial demographic at a key point in their lives. And when a site has this much scale and brand recognition, advertisers will come.”

This clearly highlights the focus of these sites.

Source: Social Networking’s Gold Rush -Business Week

Delicious and Flickr

These two services are immensly popular with many courses and projects making use of them - what happens if Yahoo changes its business model, especially now that it has lost it ranking as the number one site in the US? Could we end up in a situation where learners need to pay, again, to access their data?

Who cares?

That said, how much do people really care about who has access to their data, usage habits etc.? Perhaps this is just a few and in reality convenience is more important?

We are becoming so used to filling in profile fields, providing sites with our details that perhaps it doesn’t matter and we should just stop going on about data issues and fully embrace these excellent, new services within our learning environments?

What are the alternatives? Government sponsored spaces? Large insitutions getting together and providing infrastructure and services instead?

Entry Filed under: General, Content Storage