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.

In his Data Mining blog, Mathew Hurst posted a simple and elegant Gedanken exercise of traffic drivers to specific content from various sites. Based on the readership and interests of their audiences, he points out some clear ideas related to the differences between “popularity” and “authority”.

What I’m describing … is the difference between some notion of popularity (which may be called influence) and some other notion of authority (or expertise) and how these issues are related to both the blogger (blog) and the readers of that blog or feed. Measuring readership on topics is key to really modeling this stuff in social media which is why FeedBurner is such an asset to Google. It also captures why metrics for bloggers should capture notions of topic (something which BuzzLogic understands).

Clear and concise. Now the trick is to capitalize on this concept.