update: 2008/01/03: Robert Scoble's account was disabled on facebook; inevitable data ownership debate follows in the comments: "In Facebook’s case its competitors don’t have the same stupid TOS and let you take your social graph with you wherever you want."

Damien Mulley: "Google call this data derived data and while they are truthful about allowing you to export some of your data and just LOVE talking about not holding “user data hostage” the information those magnificent men in their googling machines derive is not given to us and they really don’t want to give that gold away."

Here's what I said the last time Mark Pilgrim brought up Freedom 0 - "good luck trying to figure out who owns generated metadata, or anything that was mined. GPLv2 'linking' is straightforward by comparison." I still think that video game data is as, if not more important, than individual web clickstreams.

Since Damien has picked up on Mozilla Weave, he might also be interested in The Coop, "a Firefox addon in development that will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends."

Anyway, aside from not being sure I trust even a public benefit with this stuff, or whether the data is kind of pointless when not aggregated, based on what I remember about the reinforcing tendencies of the kinds of algorithms and heuristics that are used to process this sort of data,  I think in a few years there's going to some seriously big paper money in attention randomiser services that will help get you information you didn't need or ask for, 'cos you'll bored out of your mind always finding what you wanted.