"Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are trying to collect as much information about you as possible. Whenever you sign up with them for a service that requires a password (such as e-mail, My Yahoo, or personalized search), you are laying the groundwork for them to one day track your behavior across different parts of the Web through your online identity. If this information is so valuable, why not collect it yourself?" says Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0.
Seth Goldstein reckons you can collect your own data, own it, and trade it.
His company is in the early stages of testing a myware service called Root Vaults (http://root.net/), an information bank that stores all the sites you visit and shows graphs of which ones you visit the most, how many hours you spend online each day, as well as the topics the sites can be grouped into (such as business, travel, or news). The first step to deal with information overload, after all, is to measure it.
Comment: Goldstein is using the AttentionTrust.org add-on to Firefox. I posted a bit about the background here in Are you paying attention? last November.
