Finally, The Internet As Intended.

Matt Mcalister, a Yahoo! insider, has more on the value of opening up your data, that underscores the thinking on my previous post - it’s now a fact, open APIs drive content usage, period:

If you operate your business like an island, that’s what you’ll be. That realization has been reinforced coming to Yahoo! where the explosion of publicly accessible APIs and content available via RSS have opened up a whole new world of opportunities.

The only thing keeping for-profit organizations from opening the flood gates entirely is that no one yet has a sure-fire business model to capitalize on the content usage explosion enabled by open sharing.

What does that mean for the government, policy institutions, and non-profits whose primary asset is information (most of the people I work with)? It means opening up is a no brainer - you don’t have to worry about finding a business model that will enable you to make money by providing free access to your information. Your objective is dissimination by itself, and open access drives dissimination.  So, once again I say, open up your data and information and let the innovators go to town with it.

Technorati tags: nptech, API, policy