Lawrence wrote “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, one of the world’s unread classics (and almost unreadable in parts: he lost the only copy of the full manuscript on Reading train station and had to recreate 200,000 words, during which he clearly became bored.) In 800 words I can communicate seven thoughts – not so much Pillars  as pillows, and not predictions but observations of this unknowable industry. Here goes:

1.  Some think its about content and others that it is about platforms and technology. For me it is still about communications, and the greatest challenge is still holding people’s attention, having gained their recognition. Even Facebook hits a plateau. The gods remain Reputation, Identity, and Attention.

2. You are either a communication company or you are not. News Corp is a format company. It does newspapers, film and television and has little corporate bandwidth for non-format communications. This cannot be changed by executive whim, and the collapse of Beyond Oblivion, its music initiative, before the holidays (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/04/music-service-beyond-oblivion-folds), as well as the veil of silence around the performance of The Daily on the iPad, following on as they do the oblivion that was My Space, demonstrates all of this very well. Yet Mr Murdoch has signed on to Twitter. There is no evidence yet that the world can be saved with a single Tweet. There is no evidence yet that traditional media and information businesses can recreate themselves in new marketplaces without either starting afresh somewhere else  or by buying a new business and moving into it. Boinc.

3. Apple, according to MacRumors (http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/03/apples-january-media-event-to-involve-digital-textbooks-and-education/), is about to enter the textbook market, maybe with Pearson and certainly via the iPad. This was apparently a dearly held dream of Steve Jobs, at least according to Walter Isaacson, who is shaping up to be not just the biographer but also the Delphic oracle. I have some doubts – not about the iPad as a display device, but about whether markets want textbooks re-invented. Learners would like learning re-invented, and made easier and more compelling. Textbooks are an extinct format. And learning should operate equally well on whatever platform you have available. What a waste of all this energy around eLearning if we abolish the old formats like textbooks and replace them with rigid device platforms. And yet I am sure that the analysts are right – there are only a few global growth markets and education is the largest.

4. Then I had a great comment from Brad Patterson at EduLang (www.edulang.com). He points out that 500 million people are trying to learn English and only 50 million can afford textbooks, online or otherwise. So his business model for his interesting TOEFL and TOIEC Simulators is “pay what you can”, with half going to a reading charity. In many ways this is very neat – it reaches out to 450 million people with a trust relationship, and could be a really interesting business model to watch. Above all, how encouraging it is to see someone moving the goalposts – we did not score many goals in regular business model configurations so lets applaud the courage of someone doing something different.

5. Semantic Web technology and deployment in mass markets is getting closer and closer. I took part in the beta of Garlik (www.garlik.com) some 3 years ago, partly because of an interest in technology around identity, and partly out of interest in technologies derived from the University of Southampton Computer Science department, and blessed by such eminences as Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt – and Sir Tim Berners Lee himself. Two days before Christmas Garlik was sold to Experian, in a move that I think was as significant as Reuters buying ClearForest all those years ago. Garlik protects personal identity through web search, was founded by the men who built the UK online banks Egg and First Direct, and backed by Doughty Hanson. This is a straw in a wind which will go galeforce.

6. But if the Semantic Web is going to be so clever, and linked data will recreate so many service environments, where is it now? Well, look at the obvious places. In most of our economies building and construction is the largest sector in terms of activity and players, large and small, and has great companies serving it with supplier and materials information. Thus, in a US market replete with Reed Construction, Hanley Wood and McGraw-Hill. But what if a semantic web-based environment were able to search all online catalogues and directories to produce a sweeping coverage of suppliers and products that was at once more detailed and more comprehensive than any directory-style database, and could include more metadata from suppliers and users to create a continually developing industry specification site, deliverable and self-formatting to every platform and device? That is what interests me about MaterialSource, (http://www.materialsource.com/about) as well as its use of SPARQL, Semantic Web Pages for faceted and graph-based browsing, smartphone and tablet Apps using HTML5, ontologies etc, etc. If they do it, someone will have to buy them!

7. I keep on thinking about the neglect of audio, so I was delighted to see SoundCloud (http://soundcloud.com/). There has to be room for an audio portal, and a community for sharing sound and cross-referencing its sources and users. I anticipate that they know things about users that Beyond Oblivion didn’t.

Last words of a predictive nature before I get back to real work. A correspondent asks “what technology are you following in 2012!” Since I say every week that I am not following technologies but users, I take mild offense at this, but I do admit to a penchant for 3D printing. Now that really could have an impact. Especially in medical workflow. I have also been asked by a venture capitalist who should know better what is likely “to be certain” to succeed this year. He is a serious man so I owe him a serious answer: anything that saves more time and money than it costs. The prime example this year in the UK has been Shutl, a delivery logistics service that gets your online purchases to you physically (average delivery time in London was 90 minutes, with a cost of £5). Is that all the queries? I am beginning to feel like an Agony Aunt!

Why is this in the least interest of the information industry? While Mr Cameron acted in order to prevent his coalition from breaking down and splits developing in his own party, his ostensible reason was to prevent the European Union passing laws disadvantageous to the city of London. Financial services are 10% of UK GDP. They must be protected as the key to success in Europe. Yet, as Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, notes in his editorial this morning, there is nothing to prevent the 26members of the Union who will now get together in tighter conclave on budget, tax and trading matters to pass laws which discriminate against City interests, as long as those laws do not infringe the current regulation of the greater community of which the UK is still a member. The Prime Minister is claiming victory: he should take care. Every British victory in Europe since 1815 has been followed by Britain losing the peace.

And have a care too in more domestic matters. The junior Business minister, David “Two Brains” Willetts, supported a leadership speech  on the importance of the British role in Big Pharma by undertaking to secure, despite lively public protests, the release of anonymized datasets covering diagnostic and prescription practice in the NHS, still the world’s largest health service. Yet he appears to forget that it is impossible to do this unilaterally. Not only are the major pharma players global titans, but providing UK-based players like GSK with information denied to their German or French rivals would be a state aid, or at least a restraint of trade, condemning UK government to the dock in the courtrooms of that very alliance whose powers they have recently been diminishing. And do these data and their availability do anything to promote employment in research labs in the UK? Nothing at all: we are missing the point about a networked economy if we think otherwise.

Elsewhere in the deeply paranoid British civil service, we continued last week in the hugely entertaining game of finding the pea under the information walnut shells. Having declared a Public Data Corporation to trade government-created content with the private sector, public consultations have led to real divisions about what this superstructure is meant to achieve. Local government and SOCITM, the public sector IT professionals, clearly read the intent rather than the effect of the proposals; This is an effort to frustrate the privatization of the UK Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Met Office by regulatory obfuscation – and it is working splendidly well. Meanwhile, a near meaningless consultation on MiData – a government plan for re-regulating identity protection – has created a panel of private sector players, including Google and the real villains (energy utilities, high street banks) to give consumers more assurance  that their identity information is not being grossly misused. The government’s seriousness on this topic is underlined by the size of their budget of £10m ($15m)!

Finally, the week ended with the revelation that school examination boards regularly brief teachers, in seminars paid for by schools, on what the upcoming examination is likely to cover. This is apparently scandalous, as if the huge National Curriculum requirement could ever be fully examined without giving hundreds of question options in the exam  papers. What is the purpose of the examination if it is not to test what has been taught? As a result, several examiners have been suspended for cheating, several inquiries have been set in train, and the interesting idea flated that all the examination boards should be combined, and then privatized (since they would then be easier to regulate, fine, and would face regular contract renewal. Pearson already own one board. And ETS formerly held the SATS marking contract but lost it after an equally unilluminating controversy about performance. Change in outcomes then may not be a direct result of the causes of concern.

Apart from which little happened in information market politics last week. Back to innovation next week, with a sigh of relief.

And this in turn re-introduces us to the battle ground in business solutions software which is the liveliest part of the B2B scene at present. It is the only battle ground where Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Bloomberg (more marginally for the moment) and Reed Elsevier do battle. And like Philoctetes and his poisoned arrows, the battle is now intense and those wounded in the last round are back on their feet and summoning fresh acquisition forces into the fray. Thus Thomson Reuters this week clear their decks by selling out of their position in trade risk management to Vista Equity Partners (http://wp.me/p17ayu-3e) in favour of concentrating their investments onto operational risk. Interestingly, the would-be purchasers here seem to have been mostly private equity players, happier with the medium term growth profile of the business Thomson Reuters were exiting and not necessarily needing, as the strategics would, a very immediate contribution today. This then was one of the few transactions of recent months that had a prerecession feel to it.

Which is not something that you could say about today’s news that Reed Elsevier are to buy Accuity (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/278a1d66-e80f-11e0-9fc7-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Z5nwd7oT). The deal, which sees Investcorp selling its position for £343 million (around 12 times Ebitda), creates a new global presence in banking solutions, where all the other players have strong interests and where Wolters Kluwer were wont to claim pre-eminence. Accuity Holdings is an interesting property, having been split out by its owner from Source Media, the old American Banker and Bondbuyer business. As one of those who worked on the then Thomson Corporation purchase of American Banker in the 1970s I feel the pull of history here. Later generations sold the business because it was regarded as a mainly print prospect. Now here are Reed buying the regenerative software arm of that once print business. No end then to our circularities!

Or our mysteries. The bit of Reed which bought Accuity was not Lexis Risk Management, where it had seemed that the resistance to Thomson Reuters bid to dominate operational risk management was centred. The actual buyer was RBI, now coming out from under the cloud of the later Crispin Davies years. The plan is to merge Accuity with Bankers Almanac, the venerable directory environment which transitioned into bank transfer coding and then into banking transactions and risk management. The guts to devise new things to sell to bankers at this juncture deserves an industry round of applause, and the risk is probably well – justified. However, Reed seem intent on building a new global business (the geographic fit here is a real value) founded on payment efficiency, risk reduction and regulatory compliance. Accuity is a data software business, with 14000 clients, a 95% renewal rate to its subscription base, and it claims all 25 top US banks as customers. Those banks, of course, are also clients of Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg. So battle is joined on a number of fronts. Reed’s shares went up 10p on the news, though one might have thought that they should have gone down an equal amount in the wake of losing BNA to Bloomberg, given that this acquisition lets Bloomberg into some interesting regulatory compliance areas, around government and also around areas like employment law BNA’s HR Advisor suite). Reading the analysts on Reed’s move, one senses the confusion: this is an immediately accretive buy that makes sense, but was performed by the part of the business that once seemed lost and now becomes the seed of growth.

So what is the strategy here now? The new grouping at RBI looks a bit like the old banking group (http://www.wolterskluwerfs.com/solutions/Market/Banking.html) at Wolters Kluwer (also run out of Chicago – Accuity was a neighbour of CCH in Skokie, Illinois). Are Reed pursuing a parallel train of thought to Thomson Reuters, but in narrow niches like banking (RBI) or insurance (Lexis Risk Management)? For Mark Kelsey and his colleagues at RBI, coming as it does immediately after the purchase of Ascend for their aviation division, this is a huge vote of confidence. For Lexis, coming on top of the loss of BNA, this seems like the opposite. Yet the strategic direction on all fronts is exactly the same: use data and software to create solutions that save the customer from the regulator, from the wrath of his customers and from himself. We are back to all those confidential documents on Googlemail.

So what is Big Data? Apparently, data at such a scale that its very size is the first problem encountered in handling it. And why has it become an issue? Mostly because we want to distill real intelligence from searching vast tracks of stuff, despite its configuration, but we do not necessarily want to go to the massive expense of putting it all together in one place with common structures and metadata – or ownership prevents us from doing this even if we could afford it. We have spent a decade in refining and acquiring intelligent data mining tools (the purchase of ClearForest by Reuters, as it was then, first alerted me to the implications of this trend 5 years ago). Now we have to mine and extract, using our tools and inference rules and advanced taxonomic structures to find meaning where it could not be seen before. So in one sense Big Data is like reprocessing spoil heaps from primary mining operations: we had an original purpose in assembling discreet collections of data and using them for specific purposes. Now we are going to reprocess everything together to discover fresh relationships between data elements.

What is very new about that? Nothing really. Even in this blog we discussed (http://www.davidworlock.com/2010/11/here-be-giants/) the Lexis insurance solution for risk management. We did it in workflow terms, but clearly what this is about is cross-searching and analysing data connections, where the US government files, insurer’s own client records, Experian’s data sets, and whatever Lexis has in Choicepoint and its own huge media archive, are elements in conjecturing new intelligence from well-used data content. And it should be no surprise to see Lexis launching its own open source competitor to all those elephants, blandly named Lexis HPCC.

And they are right so to do. For the pace is quickening and all around us people who can count to five are beginning to realize what the dramatic effects of adding three data sources together might be. July began with WPP launching a new company called Xaxis (http://www.xaxis.com/uk/). This operation will pool social networking  content, mobile phone and interactive TV data with purchasing and financial services content with geolocational and demographic content. Most of this is readily available without breaking even European data regulations (though it will force a number of players to re-inforce their opt-in provisos). Coverage will be widespread in Europe, North America and Australasia. The initial target is 500 million individuals, including the entire population of the UK. The objective is better ad targetting; “Xaxis streamlines and improves advertisers ability to directly target specific audiences, at scale and at lower cost than any other audience -buying solution” says its CEO. By the end of this month 13 British MPs had signed a motion opposing the venture on privacy grounds (maybe they thought of it as the poor man’s phone hacking!).

And by the end of the month Google had announced a new collaboration with SAP (http://www.sap.com/about-sap/newsroom/press-releases/press.epx?pressid=17358) to accomplish “the intuitive overlay of Enterprize data onto maps to Fuel Better Business Decisions”. SAP is enhancing its analytics packages to deal with content needed to populate locational display: the imagined scenarios here are hardly revolutionary but the impact is immense. SAP envisage telco players analysing dropped calls to locate a faulty tower, or doing risk management for mortgagers, or overlaying census data. DMGT’s revolutionary environmental risk search engine Landmark was doing this to historical land use data 15 years ago. What has changed is speed to solution, scale of operation, and availability of data filing engines, data discovery schema, and advanced analytics leading to quicker and cheaper solutions.

In one sense these moves link to this blogs perennial concern for workflow and the way content is used within it and within corporate and commercial life. In another it pushes forward the debate on Linked Data and the world of semantic analysis that we are now approaching. But my conclusion in the meanwhile is that while Big Data is a typically faddish information market concern, it should be very clearly within the ambit of each of us who looks to understand the way in which information services and their user relevance is beginning to unfold. As we go along, we shall rediscover that data has many forms, and mostly we are only dealing at present with “people and places” information. Evidential data, as in science research, poses other challenges. Workflow concentrations, as Thomson Reuters are currently building into their GRC environments, raise still more issues about relationships. At the moment we should say welcome to Big Data as a concept that needed to surface, while not losing sight of its antecedents and the lessons they teach.

So lets discuss, in the spirit of Fox News, something that merits some consideration. During the time from when Rupert bought and then closed MySpace, huge changes took place. These were partly to do with the emergence of the Facebook hegemony, partly because of emerging valuations for that service, LinkedIn and Twitter, partly because the succession in fashion terms seems slow to hit its stride (though I am still betting on FourSquare). But they were more to do with the emergence of a new culture around networked relations with other people, which has driven us all into discussions of social marketing, exploiting natural communities, building loyalty through networking customers, and finding out much more about user behaviours. In the information industry we have seen these issues as extensions of our CRM, with the apparent aspiration that in the Salesforce world of tomorrow we shall be able to assemble everything we need to know about the user in some Cloud-based solution platform and feed our relationships with customers in a wholly personalised way.

But what if this is not so? Since the dawn of the Web users have been stronger in marketing relationships than vendors, despite belief by vendors that they can use real world techniques  to establish virtual world advantages. We pay lip service to the idea that advertising may be affected, even replaced, by user recommendation, then spend longer periods of time arguing why it will never happen. Because, viscerally, we do not want it to happen.

And yet it may be the least of what is likely to happen, and if we seek evolution rather than revolution then we need to put our heads into some emerging user positions. An important one of these is VRM (Vendor relationship management), in which individual users decide how to hold and store critical information about themselves (not their descriptors – age, sex etc – but their performance as buyers and sellers, readers and browsers, etc). What will happen when statistically significant groups of people get far enough down the road to Data Literacy (probably the most important untaught subject in our education systems) to practise what one leading practitioner and media influencer in this sector, Adriana Lukas  (http://www.mediainfluencer.net/), calls “Self-Hacking” and others term QS (Quantified Self). We are told on the Web that ”markets are conversations”. Well, they are also relationships and transactions, and if users are able to hold and use aggregate knowledge of their web footprint then they have a considerable weapon in the battle to persuade vendors that free users are better than captive ones, and that each of us is likely to be the best advertiser of what we ourselves want.

What are the signs of progress towards this new world of “ambient intimacy”? Have a look first at the joint Harvard – Berkman Center programme around Doc Searls’ work on Project VRM (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm) and the EmanciPay work program. This has deep roots, and recalls Searl’s pronouncement in the Cluetrain Manifesto:

And if you think this is just a one-off research-funded effort, have a look at Diaspora’s alpha (http://blog.joindiaspora.com/what-is-diaspora.html) or at TrustFabric (www.trustfabric.org). As Facebook begins to slowly lose growth and start marginal decline, there may be space for a new/old view of networked relationships. Of course this is an issue intimately related to privacy (see what Mozilla propose in their Drumbeat environment with privacy icons :https://drumbeat.org/en-US/projects/privacy-icons/. And then look at MyCube (www.mycube.com), and, if you think that personal datamanagement does not relate to what the real world does , see what the Guardian does in its datastore environment (http://www.guardian.co.uk/data) to sort and re-aggregate diverse datastreams.

Still too distant to grasp? Buyosphere (http://buyosphere.com) paints a picture of semantic web based shopping in beta, and Zaarly (www.zaarly.com) is a first attempt at doing community cross-selling in geolocational contexts. This is the beginning of a new, post-Facebook world, and must be grasped now if we are to migrate towards it. Happy travels!

Outside of a full conference room were some 90 exhibitors and over two days around 1000 delegates from across the region. I hope that Incisive Media are encouraged and keep plugging away at this. The old Online conference in London is now 33 years old, and there is no doubt in my mind that in the middle of that run it was a critical meeting place for industry and users. Some of the discussions I heard in Hong Kong had exactly the cathartic flavour of those vital days of industry self-discovery. As Steve Goodall of Outsell (also a sponsor) noted in his BIIA regional and global review, this is the most significant growth area in global information markets. Even newspapers sell here!

But Day 2, for me at least, focussed on the BIIA Forum, which I attended as Chairman and where, when the conference concluded, I glowed with pride at the happy accident that had led to my five year involvement in this organization, in support of my old friend and collaborator, Joachim Bartels, BIIA’s founder and now its chief executive. It was his inspiration to set up regional fora of users and suppliers, a most appropriate one in a region of such huge diversity and different cultural styles. Looking around a room that included users from trading organizations as diverse as Merck or National Semiconductor or Cargill, interested parties like the IFC (World Bank) and the Peoples Bank of China, and vendors of services and solutions ranging from Thomson Reuters and Lexis Nexis to SinoTrust, Veda Advantage, D&B (sponsors and also participants from several countries) and Standard and Poor’s one could appreciate the range of likely debate. It was when the voices began and the questions flowed – from Hong Kong itself (including an enthusiastic group from the Chinese University of Hong Kong), from Thailand, from Singapore, from Australasia, from India, from China, from Taiwan, augmented by interested participants from Europe and the USA, that the regional magic and the connectivity to global information market trends took fire.

The issues surfaced innocently enough. In a topic devoted to eliminating information asymmetries it quickly became clear that for many participants business information was becoming increasingly controversial. There were major issues concerning government-held information in the region, symptomatic both of culture and control, and of privacy and data protection legislation. Everyone recognized the role of business information services in creating value, and the utility of those services in creating credit referencing services which enabled the region’s huge and growing trade. Yet there was also an air of discontent: current content was becoming commoditized, and in particular, it was becoming much more difficult to provide reliable and verifiable information about small and medium-sized enterprizes. And the problems were not confined to banks and finance houses: clearly identifying SMEs (or even defining them) was a problem for all traders in the market, especially as SMEs are generally seen as the engine of growth in any economic recovery. How well I recall this debate in the European Union in the 1990s, and how frustrating it was that nothing could ever be done at any level to alleviate it. I settled in for an interesting but fruitless discussion.

Which was not how things turned out. Instead real energy was devoted to ways of tackling this. One party, in which I found myself a dissident, sought remediation through re-regulation. Information control was the answer, and this had to be accompanied by better benchmarking to define what information should always be available on differently defined enterprizes at different sizes. Enforcement of disclosure was the stumbling block. Meanwhile on the other side, the counter argument that the internet was an economy unto itself, where every trader left an impression, seemed to me to have growing attraction. The implication here was that increasingly, as we move about the network buying and selling things, we should want to have our efforts noted and scored, so that the favourable or otherwise impression of our activities on everyone else could be known. This would be a competitive activity, and risk management value would migrate to those who were best at mining the network’s information yields.

And it was this that hung in my mind on the long trip back to London. We have now reached the stage in a networked society where the source of all information about participants in that society lies increasingly in the network itself. We now have the tools, in data mining and entity extraction, to locate and interrogate both structured and unstructured content. Increasingly semantic enquiry and things like this week’s announcement of MarkLogic’s experiment in this area give confidence that we are at the application and not the speculative level. Then think of the advances in workflow modelling noted here from the most major players like Lexis and Thomson Reuters. I do not seriously doubt any longer that the answers to most information services development questions are already known, because the content needed to answer them already lies, though under-exposed, in the network. And Asia-Pacific remains undoubtedly the most stimulating part of the world if you want to think about Next Steps.

That glorious past is both past and, probably, glorious. Yet the “publisher” word, once a badge of pride, now threatens to become a noose around our necks as fatal to breathing as the Old School Tie. Last week, which moved me merrily between the Imperial Boardroom in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, and the David Lean Room at London’s Bafta (there is a link there but I have no time to fish it out), was lit up for me by a colleague quoting the chairman of a major “publisher” as saying that they could not look at the potential of workflow software to support their users because “we are content people and do not wish to become a software house”. Now, chairmen of large companies make statements like this for three reasons: to confuse the enemy, to console staff for whom the speed of change is too great, and to stop the IT department investing margins in long term developments which are needed for debt repayment or to support re-financing. I quite understand. But in my view that statement draws a line in the sand which is well behind the real situation. Any “publisher” with any reasonable chance of survival already is a software house, even if all the learning experiences associated with that are outsourced and the skills base available inside is not up to the job. It has happened, and if we do not want to call it publishing lets leave that in the museum with Fred and find another word (but, please, a better one than ”information services and solutions provider”!).

My collection of news from the week aligns well with this argument. The spate of announcements from Wolters Kluwer , starting on 17 February and concluding with the Enterprize Risk Management software announcement for financial services is a case in point (http://www.wolterskluwer.com/Press/Latest-News/2011/Pages/pr16mar2011a.aspx). Here, following the Lexis and Thomson Reuters lead, Wolters Kluwer are consolidating other content -enhanced workflow environments under the ARC Logic brand. The game here is about providing links that enable a group of corporate functions – compliance risk, operational risk and internal audit – to operate in conjunction with each other while remaining fully updated, sharing the content they need to share while retaining access to those things that one function alone needs. ARC Logics brings together a group of services which the company bought separately – brands include AXENTIS, Sword, TeamMate – and now seeks to deploy them  to combine the “advantages of solution specific software platforms and enterprize integration”. In other words, these are not entirely off-the-shelf packages: they are modularized to create solutions and are intended to integrate with the corporations’ enterprize systems. And once integrated they are very hard to prize loose.

While this announcement was intended for financial services, Wolters Kluwer point out that they serve the same functions in other verticals. They specify insurance,  government, life sciences, manfacturing, healthcare and energy as places where they have clients. In this the are operating in a similar manner to Thomson Reuter’s GRC division, who were organized last year around the Complinet and Paisley acquisitions. And they have a similarly “horizontal” view, which says that similar requirements can be found in a very wide range of vertical market sectors, and that the issues are not about creating new or customized workflow management systems, but finding out how to get the right matrix of functionalities with the right lines of content.

The opposite camp, in some ways, would be Lexis, since its most successful model is in the insurance industry, and what has been built is both an industry risk management model (because insurance is all about risk) but more importantly, a core operational workflow model for running an insurance company. Here there can never be enough data, and while this model works well the US (low-level privacy and data protection legislation) it works less well in Europe. Or does it? The recent announcement that Equifax UK had bought Workload, a company that researches private wealth and asset management information, and is thus able to add content on ISAs, bonds, unit trusts, pensions and mortgages to the existing Equifax consumer files is indicative that data is like water – it usually finds its way round a dam. And it is no accident that the big credit rating companies are becoming entrenched in workflow markets: Experian is a partner of Lexis in the US, and the strategic alliance trend around content looks set to continue.

When we were publishers our duty was to our readers. But access was static and not interactive. In the age of networks  collaboration to build solutions is the requirement if we recognize that readers have become users. We talk change before we live change. Time to get real about “publishing”. And remember that, like authors, all users are equal too.

So here I am, back in the US  again (an experience that happens most months, admittedly) and once more we are in a firestorm of  service innovation. During a trip which will take me to New York (twice), San Diego and Nashville, I find a constant reminder of the atmosphere around the internet boom of the early years of this century – and the way it continued despite the dotcom bust. I heard an investor yesterday talking about the “new bubble”, while governments and bankers are still meeting to resolve the last one  (whose predecessor was the one whose subsequent regulatory adjustment would bring to an end, in our lifetimes and forever, the cycle of boom and bust…)

So what will this round of hyper-invested, hyper-hyped internet launches do to my habitual behaviours?  Quite a bit, perhaps. I have now encountered three, new to me as a user, which could fit that category. I am sure they will be familiar to many of you already, but here are some random reactions from a new user:

• I was really impressed by Qwiki (www.qwiki.com). Loved the Vimeo. delighted to see the return of Dr Louis Monier of AltaVista fame. I have signed up to the Alpha because it seems to me that the idea of defining topics and people in short clips, and then turning them into audio as well as text and maps and video equates very well with the way people learn, and with the demands of mobile access. If you are English, enter the topic “Eustace  Folville” and you will see what I mean. If this catches on then it becomes an instant referencing point for learning processes. At present the charming American computerized voice lacks all pronunciation skills, but the service does answer the teacher who said to me at BETT that “my kids are too lazy and don’t read well enough to copy Wikipedia”!  And if you are a Publisher and reading this blog, go straight to the “For Publishers” section on this site: you have around a day to decide whether you catch at the new bandwagon – or not!

• I shall certainly use www.unsubscribe.com to hoover away all of the persistent marketeers who still litter my email with unwanted marketing messages. Yes, you know who you are! Toner Giant, the Kiawah Island marketing department and others! I have tried to unsubscribe but you seem not to hear. Now we have a service that will message you back until you desist, and remove you from my inbox. I can do as many of you as I like for $20 a year, and the whole thing works on a downloaded extension to the email client which produces an “unsubscribe” button alongside each email. The internet world creates its own vices and compensates with its own correctives (the founder calls his service “email hygienics”). In October they raised $2.1 million in a funding round led by Charles River Ventures.

• And I would love Spokeo (www.spokeo.com) to work – and globally. I know that it will recreate the privacy wars , and that what it does is probably illegal in most of Europe, but I think that we all want to be able to work in a directory context where we enter one piece of information and get all the others in terms of directory access. How often I lack an email address, and even the invaluable LinkedIn cannot help, or urgently need a street address, or a location map, or to know which email address is current. I am often less concerned about social network membership, personal wealth, or photos and videos showing the individual on the web. But Spokeo searches and combines all this, and frighteningly well in the US, so that if I resided here I would want to be able to specify exactly what connections it made, especially between personal and business connectors. But what it is doing is something that the phone companies never managed to do online, and it is a solution, again, which fits a mobile access world like a glove. And £2.95 per month.

My previous generation having reached maturity with the LinkedIn IPO last week, I shall be interested to see how this new generation fares. Qwiki may be the StumbleUpon of my new crop, of course, but I would not bet upon it. Service innovation succeeds on the network because specific behavioural requirements are met, because service pricing and conditions of use are appropriate and because users recognize its place in their own personal “workflow” of active transactional engagement with the world around them. All that and something else too – they must feel good using it and feel that others think they look good as a result. Get to that last homebase as well and services score. I shall watch my new trio like a hawk!

Why?  We were working on the basis that the information economy becoming increasingly important in the US,  founded on the confluence of the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Freedom of Information Act, and could be recreated in UK plc, helping to give British companies a global marketplace in information products and services in English established on the platform of a successful domestic industry resulting from public-private partnership.

And now, 22 years later and to a blaze of media triumphalism, it is here.  Following the intervention of Sir Tim Berners-Lee , and the Prime Minister saying ” Let’s Do It !”, www.data.gov.uk has arrived as the agency for access and licensing.  Those who want the full story should go to the Guardian’s Charles Arthur, and then remember the long campaign fought by that newspaper in support of this cause.  I am hugely happy that this has happened, and  hope that the private sector, and all of the “accidental” publishers  flourishing on the web,  will grab this opportunity with both hands and use the data now available creatively to demonstrate what can be done.

And I am very worried.  In the intervening period I served for five years on the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information.  I know that the government site is still only carrying a thin slice of what is available for re-use.  I know too that the last 22 years have been marked by two things: the extreme reluctance of the UK Treasury and so-called trading funds to abandon or downscale the idea of earning fees and royalties to defray the cost of collection, updating and then selling data that they have a statutory duty to collect at the taxpayer’s expense; and the whole psychology of power retention and the implicit government servant vow of omerta that surrounds the reluctance of government to divulge anything but the most basic of information for fear that it could be used against the giver.

So will the Berners Lee initiative work?  We had better hope so, since our information economy in the UK badly needs it to do so.  But Sir Tim and his colleagues need to go on a Billy Graham-style conversion campaign to re-educate government in the collaborative nature of the Web.  And win over those bastions of protected trading rights, the Meteorological Office, the Ordnance Survey, and, neither government fish nor private sector fowl, Royal Charter operations like the Environment Agency or the BBC. The resistance already have a hefty victory over postcodes(http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page22222 ) And then they tackle an even more difficult issue: local government.

There is certainly no scope for self-satisfaction in all of this.  Sir Tim has now made the issue real to all players, something which has taken 22 years to achieve.  It would be dreadful if the political element in all of this became a casualty of the forthcoming UK General Election.  It needs all party support.  It would be pointless to spend the next 22 years expanding the base of available content so slowly that the benefits identified by the changes were imperceptible in their impact.  And above all, we need to be aware of how easy it could be for opponents to win back some of the ground that they have lost.  A report in the Observer, the Guardian’s sister paper, indicates search analytics in the US being used to ” de-anonymize” anonymized personal data, presumably by finding patterns of activity which equate to prior behaviour.  Thank goodness few UK civil servants read the Observer: the idea that names and addresses might be re-attached to medical records, for example, would shut down epidemiological research overnight in our risk-averse culture.

Within Europe, no country has organized the defence of personal data with more efficientcy than Germany. Yet it is there at the moment that we see a glimmer of light.  This month’s issue of SCL, the journal of the Society for Computers and Law contains a fascinating account by Andreas Ruhmkon of the case against the German ratings website www.spickmich.de.  This site – in English “copy or crib from me ” – rates German schools and their teachers.  Users are registered, and can score the teachers in their schools on a scale of 1 to 6 (where one is high) across a range of criteria.  These include “cool and funny”, “popular”, “motivated”, “good teaching” and “fair marks”.  Students can only complete this evaluation for the schools for which they have registered, responses that include only top and bottom scores are omitted to avoid abuses, and students can include quotations from the teacher concerned to illustrate their scores.  The system has become very popular in Germany, and has been copied elsewhere.

Inevitably, a German teacher sought an injunction to remove her data.  She felt that categories like cool and funny, human and popular infringed her privacy, while her quotations were her own property, and the site could not designate her name, age, sex, qualifications or subject expertise without her permission, despite this information being available on the school web site. (She was, by the way, rated by her pupils as a 4.3)

While she was initially given an injunction by a district court, the case finally went to the Federal Court of Justice on appeal.  Here she lost the case, on the very fascinating grounds that freedom of expression outweighed the individual’s rights to privacy, given that here the question of privacy was decided in the social sphere, the teacher’s professional capacity, and not in regard to her personal life.  While it seems to me that social and private sometimes co-mingle in ways that are less easy to sort out than this one, we should all welcome the German court decision as a sensible blow for freedom.  And while doing so it is worth noting that European Human Rights legislation, mirrored in the German Constitution, generally overrides data protection legislation like the German BDSG.  The exception appears, once again, to be France: the service www.note2be.com was ordered to remove the names of teachers because the service, according to Mr. Ruhmkon, would “endanger the functioning of the (French) educational system”.

In the UK, sites like www.ratemyteacher.com and www.ratemylecturer.com are already active.  Mr Ruhmkon reports libel actions against www.iwantgreatcare.org (physicians ratings) and www.williseemytutor.com has reportedly been closed by such threats.  And yet the German example does offer the hope that the existing social framework of freedom of expression will, in virtual as well as real society, rightly overcome unnecessary privacy rights claimed in the network which do not exist in the real world.