Data: It’s all Tim Berners-Lee can think about

No, i’m not alking about the android from Star Trek played by Brent Spiner, i’m talking about real honest to goodness data. Facts, stuff, information, numbers – you know.

Iain and I attended a talk at the Science Museum Last night (part of their centenary celebration) by Tim Berners-Lee talking about the origins and future of the world wide web. The guy is, it goes without saying, a genius and thoroughly thoroughly interesting. We learned a lot of interesting things about the semantic web and how big a role CERN played in it’s genesis (see, they’re not only good for end-of-the-world-hadron-collider-majigs). However, it is what Sir Tim had to say about data that really got me thinking [and i'll tell you all about it after the break...]

He his hell bent on supplying the web with more data. Initially, so we learned, the web grew out of Sir Tim’s desire for all the thousands of people working at CERN to share documents across multiple workstations with differing operating systems. However, he feels now that whilst content (be it text, video, image, audio, whatever) is important, he wants to see more raw data on the web.

He wants to see the web flooded with data so that we can begin to use the web to create greater and greater mashups with wider and wider use and importance. Indeed this forms part of the work he’s been doing with direct.gov getting the British government to open it’s vast resources of data. It is here, in the release of more and more raw data on to the web, that Sir Tim sees the web of the future making even greater impact on our lives.

This got me thinking about how our role as a social media agency will evolve moving forward and i’m left with the thought that the social media agency of the future will increasingly help brands and companies understand how to responsibly and usably share it’s raw data with audiences as well as help their audiences understand and make use of this data in a wide spectrum of ways. Now this might not be the case in the short-term (heck, most brands are still getting their heads around how to use Facebook or a blog to make them money) but as brands and companies begin to understand the wider implications of the social web they will, I really hope, begin to understand the importance of sharing raw data with audiences and inviting their audience to help them contextualise this data against other data sets in innovative and exciting new ways.

In sharing raw data brands, companies, organizations and institutions will be driving at the heart of KUDOS. By being Open and actively Sharing data that audiences have a desire to use both parties stand to gain with greater Useful Knowledge.