Scott Karp: MySpace = "Data" Mining?

From Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0:

[I]if I follow this latest contortion on the rationale for the $580-million-dollar purchase of MySpace, it’s all about data mining.

Which means that MySpace is officially the most expensive data mining project ever. For that price, they could have bough three market research companies. Or paid 1 million teenagers $500 to participate in focus groups...

As for advertising on MySpace, which was supposed to be the big victory for News Corp:

More mainstream marketing on MySpace will be kept to the "well-lit" areas of the site, like the Books, Comedy, Film, and Games sections rather than on individual profile pages, which have less strict content controls–something many advertisers have expressed concerns about.

Sounds more like advertising will be roped off away from the action, like protesters at a Bush rally. And even if they could, most advertisers wouldn’t take the risk of appearing on individual pages anyway.

What makes the whole edifice so shaky is the lack of any kind of agreement between the data miners and users regarding the latter's control over their data. A fundamental premise of the attention economy is that we as individual users will be willing to share our data--the content we publish as well as the metadata generated by the content we consume--if we're getting something valuable in exchange for that access, and (increasingly) if we have control over our data, so that we can take it with us, put it to work in other places, and even delete it.

If we feel that we're being used as passive sources of data to be mined or as passive recipients of semi-targeted ads, we're not going to participate. Not fully, not enthusiastically. We'll find ways to avoid the ads, we'll stop sharing our data (or simply undermine the data's validity), and the whole enterprise becomes a lot less meaningful (and valuable). Why does it seem like that's about to happen here?

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+economy attention+data scott+karp publishing+2.0 myspace