(2008-09-30) Kelly Meta Data Too Cheap Not To Measure

Kevin Kelly on the cheapness of measuring everything (Measurement). Because monitoring information is so cheap it has become cheaper and cheaper to meter until there is no reason not to meter everything. Just to be clear: the old use of the term "meter" meant both monitoring and charging. Electric companies only monitored use so they could charge. But in the new economy of abundance, monitoring use without charging for use is sufficient for extracting new value... Monitoring everything - all flows of materials, all flows of energy, all flows of people, all flows of attention - naturally creates rivers, if not oceans, of data about the flows of data (Meta Data)... At first glance there is a worry that an avalanche of data from all possible sensors, running 24/7/365 will simply drown us. What value can their be in saving every email, every web page EVER, every keystroke? One thing we've learned from radical self-trackers and life-bloggers is that while the value of ubiquitous monitoring seems nil at first, data streams of trivial actions are often the streams that become most valuable later on. Your night-to-night sleep patterns are worthless right now, but they might form an incredibly valuable baseline in the future if some emerging illness were to disturb them... One could make the argument that value derived from metering is what permits the Freeconomy. Because so much is cheaply metered, we have an abundance of free. In the long run, there is nothing that cannot be made more valuable by metering it. (And in this recursive world, even metering is not too cheap to meter, so metering the meters is a good strategy as well.) We are rapidly inventing new sensors to cheaply, accurately, and continuously measure all things in all dimensions: geo-graphical location, speed, consumption, health, fitness, repairablity, connection, performance, rest, charge, and a million other vectors. The skills to parse and divine meaningful patterns out of this new environment will become paramount and eagerly sought. Those who control the gateways to this metered information will be kings. Flows of goods and services formed the basis of the first global economy. Flows of data, the second. We are headed toward an economy built on the attention to data's data, or meta data. And there after, we'll build on the attention to attention. (Attention Economy)