http://appsbird.com/2008/07/29/ffwd-plans-to-use-facebook-app-to-glean-video-tastes/

http://www.inquisitr.com/1848/matchmine-to-power-personalized-channel-on-ffwd

http://revver.com/video/1040232/patrick-koppula-ffwd-hyveup/

I wonder if Stewart Brand and Tim O'Reilly have ever met. They might have cleared this mess up before the rest of us had to stumble through it. To wit:

Tim O'Reilly has said, the

"least-understood principle from my original Web 2.0 manifesto" is "Data is the Intel Inside".

Stewart's quote in full is much more measured

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

First let's consider the merits of each.

Tim conveys an historical counter-factual, that if you remove data from recently developed technology, it stops working. Without the index (and now the search log), Google is just a form-post text box. MapQuest is a few panning/zooming functions without NavTeq's atlas. Facebook may be nothing without the social graph.

Stewart conveys an  economic counter-factual, that information resembles currency which if used at the wrong place and time is worthless. Ducats can't be used to pay a bill denominated in Dollars. A promissory note for a thousand dollars 10 years from now can't pay my rent this month.

However, as factual statements they are both sorely incomplete and highlight rather than compensate for their individual deficiencies. To retain Tim's analogy while incorporating Stewart's logic you would need to accept the absurd corollary "Silicon wants to be free". It's more likely either or both of them are wrong (or so pithy as to be meaningless). Despite, there's quite a bit of unnecessary tension and confusion caused by technologists trying to resolve this conundrum.

As it turns out, a defensible (and more importantly, actionable) formulation can be extracted from the implicit caveats: Stewart's use of the word "right" and Tim's use of a the Intel brand rather than the generic word "microchip".

Transferring Stewart's caveat to Tim's statement is relatively simple, "The right information is the Intel inside".

Transferring Tim's caveat to Stewart's statement is trickier, but here's a shot, "On the one hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. On the other hand we can brand the delivery of the right information, in the right place, at the right time and brands want to be expensive, because they are so valuable. So you have these two fighting against each other."

Tim's fallacy is that any-old data could be the Intel inside. Stewart's mistake is attributing value to the "information" part of "right information" that is really due to the "rightness" part.

I'll leave it to the reader to articulate this synthesis in their own words for their own memory. Instead I'll end with an amusing illustration of the improved understanding it allows. Namely, we can now replace the previously silly corollary "silicon wants to be free" with the almost profound narrative "silicon wants to be branded". Neat, huh?