Ruben’s Blog| ruben.verborgh.org
Never mind the data economy. Data is unfit to form a proper marketplace: copyable goods cause an infinite supply that leaves a deeply confused demand. Meaningful trade only happens when two sides believe and expect they both stand to gain from every exchange. With data, it feels like some are always giving and others always taking. Is that because a broken marketplace makes trade fundamentally impossible? Yes. But this post is not a plea for giving up; it’s a focused manifesto for doing bet...| ruben.verborgh.org
Today’s websites and apps are built to compensate for an absence of trust, rather than to support its growth. Customers and companies both understand that human handshakes no longer scale in the digital age, and surrender to their replacement by a tap of the finger on a button labeled I accept. While every handshake comes with an expectation of honesty, this button never did: we know we are lying the moment we touch it, as does the author of the legalese no one expects anyone to read. Navig...| ruben.verborgh.org
There’s no single optimal way to query permissioned data on the Web. Data publication and consumption processes are subject to multiple constraints, and improvements in one dimension often lead to compromises in others. So if we cannot successfully complete the quest for the perfect data interface, what is a meaningful way to make progress? Over the years, I’ve been ripening a conceptual framework to cast light upon such decisions and their interactions within an ecosystem. In this blog p...| ruben.verborgh.org