People are sharing lots of things online these days. This blog is a prime example of me sharing my knowledge and expertise on IT (what little of it there is) with the wider community. Wiki’s, such as Wikipedia, are another great example of this. People also share photographs (see Flickr as a leading example) online too, sometimes photos that you would think are quite personal. But, would you, as a company, share your data?
Well, why not? OK, you’d probably want to hang on to some of it, your sales per customer, that sort of thing. But I’m sure there’s a load of data sitting in your network that you wouldn’t have a problem sharing and that would be useful to someone else. And it’s that expectation that’s driving a new site called Swivel.
But why would you freely give up something that you’ve spent time and money acquiring? Well, like every single blogger, it’s really about publicity…telling everyone that you have a unique skill-set, and here’s an example of it. So if your company is know for producing widgets, then publicising how many widgets you’ve sold is a means of saying “Look how good our widgets are, lots of people buy them!”.
December 5, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Colman,
Thanks for the post. If the desire for publicity drives people to use Swivel, that’s awesome, we hope to make it as easy and fun as we possibly can. We’re also betting on curiousity and the need for transparency. There’s tons of data public and private sitting out there idly and not telling the story, and lots of people who don’t have the time and patience to dig the interesting story out of all that data and tell it to others, and we’re hoping to help them out.
Stop by to check us out when we open our doors, real soon now.
December 5, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Dimitry,
The previews I’ve seen look great, and I think Swivel has a pretty good chance of being successful as long as you have a good ’seed’ of data to entice people to your site in the first place. I don;t doubt there will be other reasons for using the site too, I’m sure many academics will be itching to get at it both in terms of examining the data on there and adding to it. However, my focus is more business oriented, and I can see opportunities there too (for example, tie address data up with Google Maps).
I’ll be watching with interest to see how it takes off, very best of luck !
December 6, 2006 at 9:17 am
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