In today’s technological climate its a shame to see how decentralized we are. Every group is trying to take a new spin on things, but accomplish very little. Granted this is probably the most connected society the universe has known, but it could be so much more. Even with all these connections, the information technology world is fragmented. How many social sites must one keep up with. How many email accounts do you have with how many different services.
Society needs to start looking at communal data that can easily be used for data acquisition. The challenge to this is scale. One company working to make centralized communal data available to the public is difficult. The US government has created data.gov which is a federal database full of great data sets. There are also many fantastic privately run databases such as The Movie Database. I would love to see more consistency in the way the data is acquired, but this would be a monumental effort. Maybe over time you will see these efforts come together.
The data in the Ethernet (the cloud before marketing got their grubby hands on it) is already there. The only problem is that the way we access that data is fragmented. To get social data we use Facebook. For the weather we go to weather.com. The second problem is that our ability to collect data in our lives is still in its infancy. The third problem there is now real way to combine all that data, and make smart adjustments to our lives.
That is why I propose a shift in the American way of life. Where home infrastructure become the norm, and when I say a infrastructure I mean an old computer hooked up in the corner will almost certainly work. The idea is that this computer should act as a sever that is a collection point for data in the home. Essentially, I am proposing a home SCADA system. With small endpoints collecting data in the house hold, that data can then be cross referenced with public stores of data. Then you can have you home system automate choices for you, such as changing the thermostat to an optimal temperature or deciding a more optimal watering schedule for your lawn. Also the nice thing about puling data in from to cloud to be cross referenced locally is that it ensure privacy. There would be no company trying to sell you anything extra, or even sell you like a product. This would both enhance your life and keep it private at the same time.
To accomplish this, there needs to be a paradigm shift. That and the home infrastructure needs to be accessible. Easy to use. Easy to set up. So here I go, off to try and accomplish this feat. Will I succeed? Perhaps. At least Ill have fun trying.