I've been thinking about Data is a commodity:

Data isn't the valuable.

In fact, data's a commodity. We're drowning in data.

Think about it this way: the lower the cost of interaction, by definition, the more abundant data is – because every interaction creates reams of data. More data is created tomorrow than was created yesterday. And so on.

He claims the value is in the data creation:

What is valuable are the things that create data: markets, networks, and communities.

I disagree.  The data is valuable and the data creators are valuable, but they are also commodities.  (Just because air is a commodity doesn't make it any less valuable.)  However, if you are talking about where you can make money with data, I believe it's not in creating or selling the data but in helping people do useful things with the data.  The Value of Things You Don't Own touches on it when the author alludes that you create conversations and groups of friends around shared data.  However, the point they should have made is that there is tons and tons of data out there, data that is very useful to you and me, and helping people find and manage data is very much the business of the future.  Data is being created by the bucket load – "very interaction creates reams of data."   How do I find what I'm looking for?  How do I even know there's something interesting to look for?

We see this with open source software.  There are hundreds of thousands of open source software projects.  Sometimes companies are looking for a specific type of project (like a database) and sometimes they need something that they don't even know exists (like instant messaging a few years ago.)  At OpenLogic, we've made our knowledge base, our open source data, free to everyone through OpenLogic Exchange.  The data was out there for anyone to find hidden on many different websites and bundled in tar files.  What customers needed was a way to parse it, read it, verify it, find it, … we organize the data and make it easy for them to find what they are looking for.  Then if they want to "manage their data" and track open source software in their enterprise … that's where the value-add comes in.  It's not the data.  It's helping people use the data efficiently.