Gerd Leonhard delivered a wonderful presentation at the future of digital marketing in London last week. In his presentation Gerd used the quote “data is the new oil of the Internet”. He wasn’t sure who the author was but thought the quote was a powerful statement, particularly in relation to the social networking & sharing information online.
So who said it first?
New search features released by Google in May 2010 enable you to narrow down search results by time and keywords. Now in couple minutes you can find the original author – of course with an assumption that all content is indexed by Google!
If you use standard search queries you will probably find that it was Gerd Leonhard. In order to find the first result I had to use a combination of phrase match, negative terms, change the sort order and specify date range. The search phrase does almost look like a piece of code.
Here’s the final Google query “data is the new oil” -site:www.mediafuturist.com -@garyr0binson -leonhard -gleonhard
You will see the first result is linking to the speech delivered by Meglena Kuneva (EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner) in Brussels on 31st March 2009. Ms Kuneva said “Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world” . If you trust Google she is creator & original author of this powerful quote.
Go back to 2 March 2000. Economist newspaper (http://www.economist.com/node/288515) ‘Blood and Oil’
Mark Getty (Getty Images):
“Intellectual property,” he says, “is the oil of the 21st century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago: they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today’s richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.”
The quote has been attributed to Clive Humby in 2006 (!)
see http://ana.blogs.com/maestros/2006/11/data_is_the_new.html