The Metadata Wars began yesterday in earnest.....

Scott Karp notes today (re the Scoble Scraping Scrap) that in the modern supply chain, distribution no longer has the power, its in the data, and there is a data war coming. He notes, about the debate, that underlying it:

....you’ll find evidence of two increasingly apparent realities about the future of the web:

1. Data is POWER
2. A war will be fought over control of the data

We'd agree with this, but not entirely. Its not about the data, the real power is in the Metadata - the data about the data. Some two years ago we did a piece of work for a client on the evolution of "multi-media social networks", and we used the term "Metadata Wars" there for the first time to describe the land grab going on for user profile, demographic, behavioural and transactional databases.

To explain - If you go back to our Economics of the Broadband Media Supply Chain 101 post, you will see that the phase before the Distribution phase is the Aggregation Phase - and this is where the War of the Noughties is being fought.

And the war is being fought already, and has been since the appearance of the widespread broadband Web c 2003/4 - and the traditional Media supply chains are the ones who have been Pearl Harboured* so far.

Why? In the New (Broadband Digital) Media, the only distribution medium still under oligopoly control is the mobile one, and even that is increasingly under threat. For the others, as power in distribution wanes, the next "middleman" position between content creator and users is the pure Aggregation one.

Aggregation is all about the finding, organising, and publishing of data, and what has happened is that the ways of doing this have changed dramatically in the Broadband Web - Combinations and Permutations of Search, Social Networks, Transaction Messaging, AIs, DataMiners are all combining to organise and make sense of the data - ie they are all busy trying to create new Metadata-bases.

However, the Scoble / Facebook scrape is a convenient marker, that the real scrap is now beginning in earnest as New Media co's start to invade each others' turf as well as the MSM real estate.

(and the Open v Walled fight starts up as a major strategic issue as well - its no longer going to be about one proprietary play vs another)

*Pearl Harboured in that there was no declaration and the Old Media battleships being sunk are largely obsolescent anyway. The MSM still have phenomenal undamaged resources, however they are still somewhat "out to sea".