James Fee got another great discussion going on the ESRI / Google partnership asking the fundamental question of how “do you monetize your information in such a world?” Specifically a world where Google is giving away data for free.

The Google answer to this at Where 2.0 and WhereCamp was to post data that leads new users to your “for fee” content and services. This general concept was well debated and summed up fairly well is this comment. While there are many short term issues and decisions to be made by folks in regard to Google’s geo-index, I believe in the long run it will be beneficial. This may sound odd since we just launched Finder!, which provides searching, sharing and organization of geodata.

My philosophy is based on the power of a network effect for data. Just like “network effects” with technologies like cell phones and faxes, each additional data set that is made available to combine with other data sets increases the overall value of the network of data. This is especially true as you begin to make semantic association between a variety of disparate data sets. The same concept is what landed Metaweb and their Freebase application $42 million in funding. It is a powerful concept and Google, of course, is looking to be the center of the network.

The upside is you do not have to be Google to benefit from the network effect. All you need to do is have the ability to interconnect your data with the new content being produced. This does not mean giving away all your data to Google. In fact you could do the opposite and just suck in data from the Google geo idex API (although I’m not sure if the TOS restricts usage to publicly viewable websites).

The trick I believe will be to leverage the interconnectivity of Google to increase the value of your own data and services.

I think what is missing in this new equation is the ability cleanly segment public and private data while still retaining the ability to seamlessly mash them up. One of the things we did with Finder! was to allow data to be flagged public or private. This allows users to take advantage of the network effect without having to share confidential data. That way the option to expose data to web services is not binary (everyone gets it or no one gets it).

This also opens up the possibility of data marketplaces. Paul Bisset has some great comments in the Fee thread on how they have done this with WeoGeo. I believe we’ll see several new creative ways to deliver “for fee” content to the GeoWeb (hopefully interconnected and federated), especially as tools and applications develop that can leverage the data. The beauty is we are opening a whole new market to purchase the data and services that did not exist before.

As GIS data and services enter the IT main stream there will be a new market of customers to win. I think at the end of the day that will be a win for everyone just as a larger network of interconnected data (both free and for fee) will.

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