Summary of The Reputation Economy

High-Volume Storage

High-volume data storage is increasingly available, given price storage declines and capacity increases. Access to easy storage enables companies and individuals using cloud storage facilities – such as Amazon’s S3 system – to amass almost unlimited troves of data. This advance began with the humble punch cards that engineer – and later IBM founder – Herman Hollerith used to streamline the 1890 US census. The principles underlying Hollerith Cards led to magnetic disk storage, like IBM’s 350 system, and to slower but vastly higher-capacity magnetic tape storage. Today, data consumers using the cloud grab capacity from dedicated, climate-controlled “hard-drive farms” and tape-storage facilities. Jeff Bezos’s insight that diverse customers like Netflix would pay to use Amazon’s cleverly “clustered” storage paid off big-time. With consumer hard drives holding multiple terabytes now available for less than $200, massive at-home data storage is flourishing. One major consequence of ubiquitous, ultra-cheap storage is that since data deletion costs more than storage, companies, organizations and people just keep all their data.

“Reputation...