Blank (Media) Slate

We are joined by Robert Scoble in episode 9 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast. Currently the Managing Director of FastCompany.tv, he is a well-known and respected technology pundit who got his start blogging at UserLand. He is well known as an early advocate of the DataPortability Project when he tried to download his social data from Facebook.

The show is kicked off with a discussion about his recent speculation that Microsoft could buy Facebook and keep it closed. Scoble talks about the services and tools like FriendFeed that offer alternate news streams to counter the Facebook hegemony. The discussion also flowed around automated behavior tracking, advertizing, and the interplay between control/privacy within various portable data models.

Of particular interest is Scoble’s view of the inevitability of an open flow of user data:

Openness does win in the end. It will just take a little bit of time to get there. We’ll see a lot of new stuff come along to make it easier for users to open these systems up.

Episode 9: Listen | Comment
Subscribe: iTunes | Feedburner | Via Email

Episode Length: 00:26:30

In episode 8 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast we diverge from the standard format to dive beyond the headlines to explore recent news. We spent the time talking in depth about the Comcast acquisition of Plaxo and Google’s release of Friend Connect.

For Plaxo, we have Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect, and John McCrae, VP Marketing, talking about the acquisition and how it furthers data portability. Specifically, Smarr made it clear that the name of the game in portability is not making everything homogeneous, but rather opening up the flow of communication across systems:

Data portability is about empowering users to connect the tools they use so they don’t have to repeat themselves over and over again. So that the information can flow for others to discover it. It would be a mistake to characterize it as making everything exactly the same.

On the same thread, returning guest Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for Google’s OpenSocial project, highlights their commitment to the openness of data portability:

One company can’t hold anything hostage because we’re connecting together open standards. All these pieces can be supplied by multiple parties. You can interoperate without having to have a business negotiation because you can write to the standard and the standard works.

In the discussion, Marks also corrects some common misconceptions around Google’s Friend Connect. Some of the reporting about it mistakenly assumed that Google would be siphoning off the friendship graph when using it’s system to connect sites. He clarifies that Friend Connect enables the portability of user data by mapping the connections, and isn’t storing the data itself.

Episode 8: Listen | Comment
Subscribe: iTunes | Feedburner | Via Email

Episode Length: 00:35:41

We kick off episode 7 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast with the news of the week that MySpace launched “Data Availability” with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. Following immediately on their heels was the announcement that Facebook is releasing “Facebook Connect”, an extension of their 3rd party API providing deeper access to their user’s data.

We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.

The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.

Danny regularly posts on the following sites:

• Talis: N2 Blog
• Talis: Nodalities Blog
• This Week’s Semantic Web
• DannyAyers.com
• DataPortability & Me Video

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Semantic Tech Conference (Danny is speaking)
• Talis: Semantic Platform
• Tim Berners-Lee’s Giant Global Graph post
• Tabulator data browser
• Planet RDF

BONUS: We bring back Danny Ayer’s “Get Your Data Out” DataPortability Project anthem to close out the episode.

Episode 7: Listen | Comment
Subscribe: iTunes | Feedburner | Via Email

Episode Length: 0:45:47

Joining us in episode 6 of the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast is Paul Trevithick, CEO of Parity and the Founder of the Higgins Project. Higgins is an incredibly well thought-out open identity framework that’s designed to integrate identity, profile and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications and devices.

We were excited to talk with Paul about Higgins, especially since they released version 1.0 of their complete identify framework in late February. As it’s been a few years in the making, it might seem like the system wouldn’t play friendly with latecomers like some of the solutions being promoted by the DataPortability Project. Not so, however, as Paul talks through how they’ll plug into OpenID and newcomers Project VRM.

We’re often asked what the DataPortability Project is doing to help the development community, and this is a prime example. We’re helping tie the pieces together of existing solutions and promoting their utility. To that point, I circled back with Joe Andrieu to get his take on VRM hooking in with Higgins:

Higgins plus CardSpace means we have both a soup-to-nuts, open source Identity stack and a built-in client application on every .Net 3 machine. With that breadth, it’s just a matter of adoption time before the Identity-enabled net, and THAT will make VRM possible across the board.

NOTE: For more about VRM, check out In-Motion episode 2.

Before getting into the meat of the podcast, however, we hit some relevant news points:

1. Yahoo! Rewires for the Social Graph and Data Portability
2. Microsoft Announces Live Mesh
3. SocialDevCamp coming up in Baltimore
4. DataPortability DIY Project for May: “rel=me”
5. New DataPortability Logo Challenged (again)

Episode 6: Listen | Comment
Subscribe: iTunes | Feedburner | Via Email

Episode Length: 0:31:45

A couple weeks back, Keith Hopper tossed out a tweet asking me to fill him (and the Twitter crowd) in on the tools I use to produce the DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast. Since it takes a bit more than 140 characters to list out the basic ingredients, though, I figured a blog post made more sense.

At this point I was going to launch into a diatribe about how I cut my podcast teeth 10 years ago as an Executive Producer for the New England Patriots. My thought was to provide some context for how I ramped that operation from humble beginnings to eventually producing 12 hours of audio content a day, contrasting the tools I used there and what I use now… but then I realized how incomparable the situations are.

So, without any more preamble, where’s what I use now:

• Skype (free account)
• Noise-Canceling Headset (US$25)
• HighSpeedConferencing.com Account (US$40/month)
• Acoustica Mixcraft 4 (US$65)

I use HighSpeedConferencing.com to record the shows because I’ve already got an account. I was turned onto it by Phil Wolff, Editor of Skype Journal, and have been pleased with it’s simple functionality (including Skype integration, call recording, unlimited participants, local and toll-free numbers around the world).

If you don’t need all the extra features, you could probably use SkypeCast, but then you’d need Skype call recording software whereas HighSpeedConferencing.com has an automatic recording feature.

Either way you go, once you’ve recorded your show (or individual segments), you’ll probably want to edit it. You might be able to get away with a cheaper MP3 editing tool, but I’ve been totally blown away by the simple, yet feature-rich, Mixcraft 4. While it is primarily a multi-track music mixing tool, it works just as well editing plain old podcasts. In fact, editing large audio files has zero latency - not true of other software editors I’ve used (but don’t take my word for it, give ‘em a try).

At the end of the day, you’ll have an edited MP3 file you want to share with the world. I then upload the files to my server and create the RSS formatted XML file (goosed with some specific iTunes tags). Finally, I registered the feed URL with FeedBurner.com so folks can subscribe to the feed with whatever podcatcher they support.

There’s a ton of nuances I’m leaving unsaid, but I hope it’s relatively helpful to see the tools I use. If you Google “how to podcast” you’ll find a zillion and one helpful tutorials, each with their own flavor.

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.