A different take at this YC.news item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72996

In exchange for inferring anything they want enticing you with a low cost. In this case free. Owning and controlling your own data is going to be a big theme as the markets mature. Taking control of your own data makes it possible to control who can infer, how you license it.

Sure it's not free, it is inconvenient. But it means you have the ultimate say on who gets access. Your friends? acquaintances? even anonymous cowards? Probably the biggest advantage is the grubby marketers who ultimately sell by inference from your data can be held at bay.

Hey rms, no. Not copyright but control of content and through that the ability to infer. As you know I have this thing with letting third party sites have control of your data. For example by control I mean release this bit of information with "all rights reserved", another "creative commons, Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs".

I know these sites are easy to use, cheap and share. There is a cost. Maybe I'm arguing a point others don't care about. There is a better way to share.

"... I thought that all the hosted blogging platforms let people own their own data. ..."

What about meta-data? What about the logs. Depends what you mean by "their own data". I may seem to be arguing the extreme case but there are other ways you can share your data without third party social sites. It's just they haven't been invented yet. To put the third party out of business and take control of your own data is an interesting idea ... at least to me.