Robert Scoble complains about being erased. Or rather the data and content that he put on Facebook ceased to exist to the extend that he no longer had access to or control over it. We can talk all we want about how our attention data, social graph, personal data and created content is ours and we should have absolute and continuous access to it; in addition, we should be able to move it and leverage it in other contexts. This ignores the economics of the capture and storing of that data. The cost is not zero. If it were we could do it for ourselves.
And that I suppose is the point. We trade that data for a service, value traded for value. If Scoble doesn’t want to be erased, why not record a copy of everything he puts into a commercial website? He could keep it on a local hard drive or a network storage service. Or perhaps in some kind of gesture bank, where he could trade its value for goods and services.
Scoble needs to remember that it’s not really his, unless he invests in making it his.
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