It has been hard to write of late. There is so much going on right now in terms of new social media experiences. My wife said it was so “cute” that I was just getting into Facebook now, after it had been open for 18 months already. I snapped back that it was really just opening up now. My spontaneous application promiscuity on its platform is embarrassing. I feel like a teenager with raging widget hormones.

It is a lot of work to express yourself uniquely online. You need to manage all of your various profiles across so many networks. Each network and engine represents a different source of traffic to your personal stream- Google, LinkedIn, WordPress, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Furthermore, they each provide different degrees of control over how your electronic likeness is distributed to others. In Media Futures speak, these are your various API’s (some which you control fully like your blog, others not at all like your PageRank) that together form your unique Algorithm identity in the online world.

This all makes sense, from the 30,000 feet perspective that I typically have written from in the intellectual capital that is New York City. But now that I meet with folks at Grove in the Marina instead of La Fortuna on West 71st street, I am both more engaged in the “real” world of Internet startups but also that much more conflicted by it.

While there are certain voices out here that call for radical transparency so as to keep any unsavory data mongers at bay, those same voices forever remain two cycles ahead of what gets funded and remain marginalized to watch as others commercialize their ideas from two cycles hence. The Internet is a data platform and therefore Internet businesses need to generate cash flow off of people’s data. This is the reality of the multi-billion dollar cookie cocoon that we are all clicking away within.

Still, regardless of how hopeful or hopeless the open Attention ecosystem proves to be, there are early traces of “mass market” Internet services paying Attention to Attention. For example, YouTube now enables me to “broadcast” what I am watching as a form of entertainment for others:

And LinkedIn now enables me to see who else has visited my profile

Granted these are small steps, but they are small steps by large players. Not to mention some truly open Attention thinking practiced by Google in both their Reader and Web History products that I will discuss in a coming post.

Despite all the hyperbole about the Internet advertising market M&A activities, I am surprised at the lack of critical perspective about the consolidation of cookies being placed and managed on users’ computers without their knowledge.

The recent spamacornucopia means more than $10 BILLION DOLLARS OF YOUR DATA IS BEING EXCHANGED AMONG BUYERS AND SELLERS THAT YOU DON’T CONTROL, starting with DoubleClick (and H&F their private equity owner) and Google, and then Right Media (Redpoint) and Yahoo!, and then 24/7 and WPP, and now aQuantive and Microsoft.

I have heard that a profile is worth a dollar.

One could assume that a clickstream is worth $10.

We know, after all, that a mortgage lead can be worth more than $100.

How much is a cookie worth? As in, how much does it cost a company now on average to place a cookie on a user’s desktop? Of course the folks at Tacoda, Blue Lithium and Revenue Science would know this with more granularity, but my sense is that a cookie is currently worth about $.10. Please comment below if you have additional perspective.

And so, the $10 billion dollars worth of online advertising deals would equate to about 100 billion cookies served.

Do we as users have any sense of this reality, or any control over its consequences?

Tom Glocer,  CEO of Reuters, stands in front of  Media Futures at the Open Data Conference in NY

And so, what does exhibitionism have to do with Wall Street?

How does the voyueristic behavior of 20-somethings relate to the commission decisions of hedge fund masters of the universe?

Traditionally, very little.

Or at least we weren’t aware of these connections.  Now, however, the advent of personal surveillance technologies has begun to popularize processes that up until now have been unavailable to individuals.

This resonates with a comment that Reuters CEO Tom Glocer made at the Open Data Conference.  It was the night before the conference, over dinner, that Glocer gave his perspective on the evolution of "open data" in the context of financial services. 

He told a story about the transformation of individual data points into market data.  Surprisingly, he didn’t start with a traditional financial services firm, like Reuters, but rather with an individual Schwab customer.

This retail trader, by virtue of her decision as to what to buy or sell and at what price, is the most granular actor in the price discovery machine.  As Glocer told the story, the online retail investor was the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Hawaii causing hurricanes in China.  Her only action was to trade a stock in her 401K account online; but unbeknownst to her, Schwab took this trading data, along with that of all of the other individual retail investors, and established a higher level trend.  This process reverberated up through larger institutional brokers like Goldman Sachs and ultimately exchanges like the NYSE.   At each step up in aggregation and abstraction, significant economic value was extracted.  Although this individual’s behavior is too volatile in and of itself to offer much in the way of trend analysis, this does not mean that her behavior is worthless.

This is the foundation of Wall Street 2.0:  the individual data producer is beginning to wake up to the economic value she is creating.

This economic value had in the past been appropriated by those aggregating up the data from above.   Our electronic behavior, whether it be querying a search engine, clicking on an ad, checking out a stock, or trading a share, is generating value for other people that are in a position to aggregate and sell this information to institutions, who in turn transform it into some other form that ends up getting sold back to individuals.   Alchemy… to… Arbitrage.  This is nothing new.  What is new, however, is the extent to which our behavioral trails are no longer hidden, but are instead now available to us via various modes of personal Attention services, also known as myware.   This is the window that Open Data flows through:

Open data is to media what open source is to technology. Open data is an approach to content creation that explicitly recognizes the value of implicit user data. The internet is the first medium to give a voice to the attention that people pay to it. Successful open data companies listen for and amplify the rich data that their audiences produce.