Blank (Media) Slate

The idea of portable data isn’t really very new. In fact, it’s been around since we learned to write on paper (as opposed to those cave walls - talk about a silo of information). The recent twist (and reason for all the hubub) is really around the portability of “personally-contributed” data.

Basically, when signing up to a service users expect that any information they provide can be used by the service, but that they ultimately retain the rights to extract the data and take it somewhere else any time they want. Unfortunately, there are both some technical and legal hurdles these folks will have to overcome before this can happen. Both sets can be overcome, but doing so will come with a price (what doesn’t?).

In the end, defining a set of standards for the portability of personal data makes absolute sense. Getting there, however, will require a clear specification of what “personal data” includes. For example, does it include all of the ratings you’ve made to the content on a site? And what about your posts (eg. reviews, comments, etc.)?

For all these questions and more, I suggest you plug into the DataPortability group. As Chris Saad says in a recent post:

It seems that the web will dramaticlly evolve again this year. It used to be the Web of Pages, most recently it evolved into the Web of People… it seems in 2008 the Web of Data begins to take root.

Join the party at DataPortability.org.