Saturday, January 21, 2006

What makes information valuable?

A few more thoughts on Apple I-life 06.
To me it’s significant because it brings us further ina development that is changing the media and the ways in which we use it. The tools we use for the most part to produce media where developed according to a paradigm where information was mainly something you created and transmitted – or you recieved and consumed it. It was a step by step process, mostly one way.
But a tool like I-life 06 reflects and promotes a differenct paradigm. It takes it for granted and it encourages you to use media in a new way.
You know:
Where Information is created and exchanged as a conversation with a potentially very large network of participants – rather than producers and consumers.
Where each information unit is treated as a component that can be reused, changed, combined with other units, tagged, commented, linked.
So, information is flow, information is under development, information is participatory.

As our tools are changed to fit this paradigm, I think we will start to think differently about what makes information valuable. New qualities will become important, such as:
- open code
- easy to pass on and recombine
- standardized format
- receptive to tags and meta data
- with a community around it

And, it seems that very similar considerations will apply to every business and realm where digital technology is a dominant part of the value creation.

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