It may be time for a New Deal in online marketing

With all the talk about online 'privacy', and how there is a trade-off between users of the web and providers of 'free' services, I finally installed a plug-in to my firefox browser that blocks all cookies, unless I specifically whitelist themu

I don't play games, so I don't need any scores stored locally and the Firefox password manager does a good job at remembering passwords for sites that need them, and I have no problem whitelisting my own servers and those I really trust

This led me to a thought, which although not new, warrants re-thinking.

I want to consider tracking all of my online behaviour, locally or in a data storgae that I manage and own.

Appparently from all the chatter, its quite valuable.

If my trail of usage is so valuable, I want to be able to package this and use it in fair and open commerce

What a market that would create! A fair one at that.

Sure, maybe its only worth a couple bucks to twitter and a couple to google, but if you add it all up, and judging from the amount of cookies I just deleted, hundreds of companies are actively engaged in collecting my data.

I'd like to help them, I can collect more than they can covertly, and I can do a much better job of sorting and managing the connections they seek to make.

Then I'd like to sell it to them, or barter it.

I'd need a good contract of course, one that explains exactly how my data will be used, and my counter-party should be able to be held accountable.

Such a Personal Data Vault could be implemented for many different uses. It would certainly be interesting to historians in decades to come.

I don't know if a system like this has been designed or tried, but I'd love any pointers if it exists.

[postscript]

Judging from the amount of Firefox anonymizers and proxy add-ons, there seems to be a lot of knowledge on how to block things and 'cloak' yourself while online. Why not store all this valuable data?

This stuff is worth money. The first company to create this product will be building it for their first customers. I certainly would barter some of my data in exchange for being able to make more money by reselling it to other companies. Over, and over, and over again.

An example:

"Hey Paperboy!" (New York Times) "I'll give you a month's worth of data for a month of access to your news"

 2/24/2012; 9:40:38 AM.   .

I'm winding up the first work week of using Ubuntu exclusively on my work machine. The back-story of my switch to 'Mountain Goat' is here

The experience has been nothing but pleasurable. There is very little difference between working on OS X and Ubuntu. This is good.

Of course there's a learning curve, keyboard shortcuts are different for one, and as I decided to not customize the out of the box interface and apps, there's been some learning there as well.

But learning new apps and work flow is fun and often rewarding. It challenges my brain and gets me thinking of new ways to manage things.

As you can imagine, I've received many offers of help and suggestions from the global Linux communities. I like this about Open Source. Yes, the Mac has also has a community vibe to it, but the vibe on Linux is more Punk Rock to OS X's Disco feel.

I'm really impressed at just how much great work a worldwide decentralized group of people can achieve.

 2/24/2012; 8:55:29 AM.   .