Devauld.ca

Recently I have been pondering the asymmetry of user provided content on the internet. These thoughts have been growing in magnitude since they first skipped across my consciousness about a month ago.

The adventure started when I purchased myself a kindle to start off my 34th revolution around the sun. The device brought me back to the butterfly romance stage in reading. Easy to use, and ever available, I unfortunately began to diverge away from my required studies to spend time reading adventures of protagonists and fables of disbelief. Exploring the internet for possible leads into worlds unknown, I found myself on the goodreads website.

This is where the fabric of the perfect tapestry started to show some loose ends. My difficulty with good reads, is that I do not want to go through the effort in adding all of the hundreds of books I have read up to today. To the benefit of goodreads, they allow for an import, and export and although I could enlist a delicious monster to help me get all this data together, I paused; my thoughts running about wildly.

I was previously burned on spending time to provide the internet's most valuable commodity: user provided content. I spent some time on Rotten Tomatoes forebearer Flixster, rating a plethora of movies that I've seen. The time spent was rewarded in being provided with highly rated choices from people that shared interests very similar to my own. The problem being is that even though it was my, and my peers, effort that created the value in the database, once the information had landed on their site, they came to view it as theirs. Then about a year later, when I was test driving Netflix, I found that I wanted to get the information I created out of it's current repository and into my new acquaintance so it would be able to help me out in my viewing exploration. Nowhere could I find even a simple listing of ratings that I've made, so that I may cobble together a script to extract information that is rightfully mine. It appears on the surface that they went out of their way to prevent me from getting this information.

The one-sided view of information on the internet was once again right whispering in my ear. Just as my Flixster ratings are forever locked within their vault, to never grace the likes of IMDb or The Movie Db. Even simple asymmetries like not being able to get my Canadian Amazon Wishlist into my American Amazon Wishlist so it can be viewed on my Kindle are starting to irritate me.

In the end, the problem is a mindset. Some darling visionaries like Wil Shipley and Otis Chandler are chipping away at the wrong mindset that the medium controls the information. Truth is, the information held by those other websites are my opinions, and although there is probably a clause or five in the end-user-license-agreement-that-nobody-ever-reads that says otherwise, I'm pretty sure those opinions are still mine. There needs to be a shift in mindset, moving towards focusing on the user. Think of the benefit to both large commercial entities like Amazon as well as little ol'peons like me if I could easily get an export of books and push them into their system. Sure, you run the risk that if something better comes along, that I'll just take my data and leave; this is the main reason that I believe the curmudgeons of business keep these exports from being readily available. Do they really believe that by not allowing me to see all the media I've rated, that I'll just keep coming back to rate more stuff? Instead, as soon as I discover their desire for a one way flow of information, I clam up and stop giving them any information. Instead I option for mediums that allow me for an unfettered flow of information that I help create.

The advantages of keeping this information open far out weight the costs.