Stop duplicating: Raw Data Now

Citing the Text: The Weblog of Andrew P Brett

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, recently spoke at the 2009 TED conference. His talk was an inspirational glimpse into the life of someone who has clearly never stopped exploring and always done what was intriguing to him -- it just so happens that his road wound up providing a tremendous benefit to society.

Some highlights of the talk were Tim's *sheer joy* at the notion that he had made an addition to a collaboratively edited map; a new Three. Word. Mantra (Raw Data Now); and a shoutout to a previous outstanding TED talk on the power of making data useful and universally accessible (sounds familiar).

Tim also put up a cartoon that made fun of the fact that all of these different social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) exist in silos, incapable of fully interacting with one another.

This is certainly a problem that the major sites are aware of and are working to fix; Facebook, for example, allows me to import a feed of my activity on Picasa (Google's photo storage/sharing service).