What if you got paid for every field you ever put into social media?
Google has started pushing their "local" program, which is essentially hoping to go head to head with the Yelps of the world, but have it more natively integrated with our hand held devices (at least those using Android - 86.1 percent of all smartphones sold in Q1 2017). Google is gamefying this process in a very similar way that FourSquare did with their badges and mayor-ships, but no matter how slickly or entertaining they make this process, or how insync they have us believe we are with our communities, the over riding reason they're doing this is to monetize off the automation they've created in user's data habits (yes, we've esentially turned us into data gathering drones).
Google will profit from you in a multitude of ways, but quite specifically in this model there are two i'd like to focus on: 1) they will create a more robust information and review portion for their maps and queries that use your personal info to populate all relevant information on their site; 2) they will also make money by selling your personal history coupled with other data variables to the highest bidders. Yelp and tripadvisor, etc are all doing the same thing, but for the sakes of this, I'll just keep talking about Google because they're so highly ingrained into everyone's day to day (search, ads, docs, calendars, youtube, etc).
Below are a few jpegs that show the series of questions that Google prompted me with, once I agreed to provide information on my favourite restaurant. The questions are almost endless and I got 8 "points" for filling out that information. (there were 8 in total but 4 gives you the idea)
I didn't receive money of any type for assisting them. My information isn't secured and kept separate from other portions of my data that they own/govern. Why am I doing the work and not profiting? Why is my information of value, but not to me? This is where a blockchain solutions for "disrupting" portions of data gathering and monetization could have real potential.
One of the neatest concepts I've heard for the blockchain is for it's use in holding your medical records. You could sell specific portions of your file to different studies, understand how your records were being used and where they were going. There would be a ledger of the agreed upon transaction and tokens provided to advance people further down the chain you allow (and profit from). This seems like a wonderful way to both help scientists find useful samples for their studies and for would be doners/volunteers to be monitized for their contribution at every gateway that their data is providing benefit.
So, if we take that same model and apply it to "disrupting" the review and data populating cultures, we could enable people to have ownership over their content/identity. You'd get paid in all instances where your content was used. My responses for Fleur de Sel on Google's network has a monetary value to Google, and I should get some of the profits from that, not "points". It's really as simple as that.
You could start to work on the concept of authority that Google was once tried and issue a person a community footprint and a quality of feedback score which would be factored into their monetary payment (not all participants/feedbacks/dataPoints are created equal, especially as we add in geo-locations, topic relevance, etc). Every field that you enter in your Facebook or Google profile is worth money, and the blockchain could help you own that.
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OT :: If Google wanted to have fun with this "points" system and get people talking about a topical project, they could even make their own "google coin" crypto currency that they use as a reward program instead of their ridiculous "points". I would be much more willing to provide free information if I believed it was like mining for a "bitcoin" that could potentially have value through ownership, which the points will never really have.
