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In the long run, there is nothing that cannot be made more valuable by metering it. (And in this recursive world, even metering is not too cheap to meter, so metering the meters is a good strategy as well.) We are rapidly inventing new sensors to cheaply, accurately, and continuously measure all things in all dimensions: geo-graphical location, speed, consumption, health, fitness, repairablity, connection, performance, rest, charge, and a million other vectors. The skills to parse and divine meaningful patterns out of this new environment will become paramount and eagerly sought. Those who control the gateways to this metered information will be kings.

Flows of goods and services formed the basis of the first global economy. Flows of data, the second. We are headed toward an economy built on the attention to data’s data, or meta data. And there after, we’ll build on the attention to attention.

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Kevin Kelley - basically this is the idea behind bit.ly and some of the other things in the betaworks’ network.