I watched a great video by Tim O'Reilly about the importance of (he says data, though I would choose the word) information,  Because O'Reilly is a veritable fountain of knowledge in many areas of computing he said a lot of good things along the way.  His main point though was that tremendous market pressure is focused toward a single-source for data - by Google, Microsoft, or whomever - and that we need to actively resist that force.  He raised this as the question, "Who will own the internet operating system?"

In a less-lofty realm of thought, I had and fantastic lunch (Osaka Sushi in Plano, Texas is my new favorite buffet!) with Steve Scheffler of VSI Solutions.  Steve is a consultant with a rare combination of business savy and systems development experience.  We hit a dozen topics in an hour, but the one that left me pondering was the tension between todays ORM-based systems and organizations' need for the information assets accumulated by those systems.

The common thread between the two is this: information is the thing.  It's great to have a killer application.  It's critically important to have smart, high-caliber people.  But the enduring legacy of human life is information and that information is the leverage that individuals and business and government need to become more effective. 

20+ years ago I had a short-term infatuation with library science.  It was early in my database days - I think I was working with Informix and DB2 at the time.  But I caught just a glimpse of the picture that's now emerging.  It looks like this: ownership and access and analysis and filtering and diseminating of information is the revolution on whose cusp we now stand.

There are lots of directions this thing could go.  It's a bit like riding a bull.  I only the tiniest bit of control, so mostly I have to hang on and enjoy the ride!