Greetings person of the digital era! Let’s see how you store your knowledge, your wisdom, your data. Your (very very early) ancestors had word of mouth. Then came drawings and hieroglyphics and then written language and tools let words be inscribed on stone. Scrolls, books and analogue storage of text, audio and video followed. And then? Digital storage! Yay. A whole new world, infinite possibilities (given enough capacity that is). In our time a considerable part of your intellectual, emotional and work stimuli are largely defined by ones and zeroes: data stored on, or streamed to, computer devices of varying forms and sizes from a myriad of storage media or other computers possibly scattered in all six continents. All this data is part of your life. And an important part at that.
Why is it then, that you sacrifice such an important part of your life so carelessly? Yes you, the average computer user.
Closed formats == No guarantees
One way you compromise on your data’s integrity and value is by supporting and trusting (as a good friend replied to me yesterday, when I questioned his desire to buy a Windows laptop) proprietary formats, such as those created by companies like Microsoft and, in some cases, Apple. Data formats and software, that go against standards and provide no interoperabilty in the name of ‘improved’ functionality and ease of use, characteristics that more than often than not end up being just marketing-talk. Are you sure that in 50 or 100 years’ time people are going to be able to read and interpret that obscure binary format from the late 20th century you wrote a letter in? How about that proprietary audio or video file? It’s only been around thirty years since the Personal Computer made its appearance, and already some of the early formats for audio and video dating from the early 1990s are unsupported on modern software. Getting the latest version of Word or Excel becomes pointless as does compressing your movies, intellectual content you’ve probably paid for, in proprietary formats such as Windows Media. Software is a physical book with a lock and data the content written on its pages. Trusting someone else with the key of your book is not exactly wise. Especially if there is no guarantee that this person will be around (and that they’ll be willing/able to give you the key) forever. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems’ President and CEO, wrote about this a few weeks ago in his blog, in an article promoting the Open Document Format (ODF) a format that is slated to rival Microsoft’s Word (.DOC) in the next few years as governments and companies begin to disentangle themselves from Microsoft’s lock-in. Schwartz has a vested interest in ODF of course, as his company supports and sells the ‘commercial’ version of the open-source and free OpenOffice.org, called StarOffice. But that does not in any way diminish the importance of his comments: Open Formats are good. They are good because they allow you to freely choose your software without being locked in.
Go Online? Kind of.
Going online with your data is a recent development. Most people I know haven’t really realised what it means: the increasing dependence on centralised service providers. Companies like Flickr, Google or Yahoo!, etc. that are eager to store your email, photos, videos and, why not, music. Sure, there is always the argument that those companies are staffed by professionals that make sure your data is kept safe and accessible, and it’s true that using their services is not necessarily bad. Not at all. The problem is people start depending on them. A few years ago I was reading the blog of a professional photographer from the U.S. where he claimed that he was keeping three or four copies of each photo he took with his digital camera. He burnt them on two CDs stored on physically separate locations and kept a local copy for immediate use on his hard drive. He made sure that the CD-Rs he was using were of high quality, and routinely kept refreshing his backups every few years despite the fact that they were rated for 70+ years. Yep, pedantic I hear you think. I agree, it probably is. But then again, how important is your newborn’s picture to you? How about your family’s trip or your {boy,girl}friend’s/daughter’s/son’s graduation. Apparently his photos are that important to him. Besides, there is no guarantee that Flickr, Google or Yahoo! will be there in 2020 and that your data will still be available to you in one form or another. And arguing that you never back your data up anyway and that storing them on Yahoo!’s or Google’s servers is better than nothing is such a flawed argument anyway. There is no replacement to proper backup. None. And even if you have a SLA or subscription, I am sure your personal or work data are probably worth way more than what your online service provider will pay you back in case they lose it.
The Decentralised Net
I’ve written about this before, but here goes once more. The internet was devised as a distributed network. Many of the core protocols are inherently decentralised. In the 1990s the explosive growth of its userbase and the bandwidth gap between coroporate/government/military/academic and user systems instituted the need for client-server protocols. This is becoming less and less the case today. Broadband connections hundreds of times faster than those available to consumers in the mid-1990s are becoming commonplace in Asia, Europe and the U.S. What’s the point of centralising now? The technology is already there to allow personal ‘servers’ and ‘domains’ to serve content, applications and personal data to the world without depending on the Flickrs and Yahoo!s of this world. The Semantic Web (whatever this means this year) even promises to make the role of the search engine less important too. I am not at all convinced about the merits of web applications, although I do see advantages in the paradigm. So I guess my view is that ‘Net Applications’ (cf. WebApps) should be served by personal servers and written in something more appropriate than HTML+CSS+Javascript+AJAX, but equally Open and Accessible.
Closing words
While scientists, large organisations and governments are struggling to find new ways to store and maintain the vast amounts of data generated by business, social and scientific processes, individuals are typically extremely careless with their own personal data. It’s disconcerting how easily personal data get lost everyday due to bad habits, ageing media, old formats and lack of thought and how much that same data is really worth, not in economics, but in emotional and social terms to millions of people.