The world of technology sometimes seems like an echo chamber. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard the utterance, ‘data is the new oil’, said to have been coined by British mathematician and data scientist Clive Humby way back in 2006. This only appeared to reach our shores about a decade later, and is still repeated by those who want to appear clever. What they mean, of course, is that there is value within data, but as analyst Benedict Evans has it, comparing data to oil is nonsense. Data is not just one thing, but collections of information specific to an application and that can’t be used for anything else. Writing in the Financial Times, he quotes his friend and open source guru Tim O’Reilly as saying, ‘Data is not the new oil. It is sand,’ or it’s only valuable when you have an awful lot and you can aggregate it, such as in the example he uses of domestic electricity usage in your town, city or country.

The value of data, for Evans, is in the flow of actions around it, like the interactions to a post rippling through a social network.