Vendor Relationship Management and The Support Economy

When I read The Support Economy a few years ago, it resonated in a Cluetrain-esque sort of way.  If I recall correctly, one of its main premises is that due to the considerable pain presently involved in managing one's relationships with vendors, an economic shift would take place around alleviating (and hopefully eliminating) this pain.  One of my new year's resolutions is to re-read that book through the lens of both attention and Doc Searls' recent musings.

From a legal standpoint, one's data is likely to be considered one's property, or one's personal, identity-centric information, or both.  Along these lines, fellow ZDNet blogger Steve O'Hear had a great post this week:   Do ordinary users care about data portability? And if not, should they? Four social networks respond.  Note that both the ownership rights and identity themes crop up in the interviewees' responses concerning user data.  To what extent it's sound public policy to permit one's rights in such data be licensed or assigned via boilerplate terms of service is one of the coming key issues of the Live Web, in my estimation.