Fred Wilson gave a talk entitled “Does Information want to be Free?” in which he talks about the value shift from information to attention. He makes some great points and I would urge anyone in and around the content business to take a look at his presentation which is available on the web.

Creating ways for content to be pushed off websites and consumed in whatever manner users want is definitely the way forward. Putting metrics and monetization around these content bites also makes a ton of sense. Ultimately, getting into user flow is critical. It’s far better to make information available to people wherever they want it rather than to force them to come to your site and do jumping jacks to get it.

I think there are a couple of dimensions to data portability. One concerns consumers of the data and that’s been discussed. The other concerns creators. They should have portability as well. Why should they be locked in to a particular site or publishing platform. Dave Naffziger had some good things to say on this subject a little while back and it was around my move from Blogger to Wordpress.

In an ideal world, people would create data wherever they wanted and it would be available for consumption wherever needed. Fred’s assertion that RSS is the glue is right on the money. Having said that, I think RSS needs to come up with simpler language to get beyond the blogosphere and those of us in the industry. (See Andy’s post about RSS & “Ask a Skeptic’s Mom”)