Tony Fish introduced the panel, raising the point that in companies quest for our personal data, we, as individual, have to think about where we are on the public-private data sharing continuum.

He brought the idea that there are 2 forms of public data:

• the paper/radiowave style public (tv, paper press) which has a very short lived footprint
• the internet style public (social media, youtube, twitter, everything internet based etc) which stays for years to come, with implications that we are still trying to understand and often learning at significant cost (at least in terms of reputation, brand etc).

Tony also raised another point which is that the way we perceive this continuum not only depends on our mood (on those bad days, we don't share as much) but also on the value we feel we get from the service we share data with (or actually give data to is probably a more accurate description in many cases).

The backlash recently experienced by Facebook and Google wasn't surprising. While many argued that too much data considered private was made public without the user's consent, from the end user point of view, there was probably a lack of perceived gained value.

One suggested we should actually own our data and trade it with websites for a cost.

If services would deliver more value, such thoughts wouldn't exist, but there is clearly an issue of lack of value to date.

So if you are a website owner, when you ask your users to give something (eg, I like this), it isn't abnormal that they expect something back in exchange right away, not 12 months down the road. The idea of instant reward is built-in many of the most successful sites, as a way to lower the barrier of engagement.

Qype has enabled such feature using the LikeCube service, with their quick rating game. Any visitor (anonymous new user or registered qyper) can play this game which allow you to rate on the fly places you might like and get instantly rewarded for sharing this info with personalized recommendations. A neat way to engage users to share their data with clear benefits.

So how are you going to entice your users to share their data?

This year's edition had a very strong coverage of anything that touches geolocation, realtime and personalization. Not surprising when you think that Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla became mainstream in the previous editions of SXSWi.

This morning I attended the panel on the realtime web, with Google, Gowalla, Microsoft discussing where the future lies. There were challenging arguments about the need for an open standard on realtime information. However making the realtime stream more digestable was surprisingly unaddressed... at least in public.

People say corridor talks are the essence of SXSWi and I have to agree - it was the informal chats on where geolocation and realtime should go that were really interesting, especially with the great folks at Gowalla and Foursquare about where services like these should go next.

There was a brilliant panel on Engines of Sociality: 2010 and beyond, which concluded that nearly all the changing information on the Internet will flow through social streams. It was argued that this is the reason why the majors have all been so excited by realtime data, because they essentially offer unparallelled access to information and more importantly they recognise the personalization potential it holds.

But for those using realtime information, the constant question remains: Am I missing something?

And finding the right fliter isn't trivial, should it be the wisdom of the few? Or the crowd? Or our friends? Or by the self? Or the social graph?

At LikeCube our approach has always been to use our expertise in discovery and personalization to apply the right filter to the right type of data - making sure you don't miss things, by feeding you the right data at the right time, filtered to your taste.

So how do you ensure that you convert them at that point? Encourage them to book somewhere despite the lack of availability?

One of the best things you can do is to show your visitor alternative hotel recommendations on the hotel page. Surprisingly, very few hotel booking sites do this, while it is already commonly accepted in the retail industry (think of Amazon's "you might also like...").

Of course those alternatives need to be relevant to the user and close to the place they have just found. But by showing similar hotels in a very prominent place on the page, you are very likely to reduce bounce rates and increase your chances of conversion.

You will also gain trust and loyalty if the hotel recommendations were spot on.

Finding similar products within a database of several thousand hotels is certainly something the LikeCube semantic engine can deliver, so if booking abandonment is a familiar issue, contact us.

HEDNA, founded in 1991, is a not-for-profit trade association whose worldwide membership includes executives and managers from the most influential companies in the hotel distribution industry.