Nitin Borwankar put forth a compelling commentary as it relates to Data Portability vs. a deeper Terms of Service (TOS) discussion on behalf of the consumer:
The real problem – The Elephant In the Room – is whether web app vendors “play fair” with my data when it is IN the web app, not whether they “allow” me to take my data and go play elsewhere. There are two major choices for a web app user here, just as for a dissenter in a social structure – “voice” and “exit”. Data Portability focuses only on “exit” and is not just incomplete but massively disempowering to the user of the web app.
He then called out four points he sees as the consumer’s “voice” within a given service:
Data Accessability (DA)
Data Visibility (DV)
Data Removal (DR)
Data Ownership (DO)
You’ll probably want to read through his entire post for the full meat (there’s much there), but he sums up with:
In summary, incorporating Data Property Rights into the current conversation completes the picture by adding the web app user’s “voice”. This empowers web apps users and it also seeds new viable business models. For-fee services providing strong user rights without a coercive advertising model will emerge and form a new “data infrastructure” layer of the Internet Operating System – it’s a need that is crying out to be fulfilled. If the dominant players do not want to satisfy this need then market forces amplified by user emotion will disrupt them and we will see once again how the net routes around damage – in this case badly damaged Data Property Rights.
I agree with much of what Nitin is saying here. I see the DataPortability Project story as being a strong part of this picture he’s painting. I understand there are a lot of nuances here between “Data Portability” and his four points, and time will tell what consumers latch onto and how the ball is moved forward.
I believe the world’s moving quickly to a point where content units will be quantized to the degree where they will easily flow between distribution/syndication channels. Perhaps it’ll be driven by something like what people are calling the Semantic Web, basically allowing content units to be self-describing so they can be assembled by consumers and their agents (eg. sites, applications, feeds, etc.).
The value in the relationship with a customer, then, is centered around servicing them. Regardless of the content they’re seeking, companies will want to develop a solid relationship with their consumers. In this model, the long term value to the consumer could be a function of (DA,DV,DR,DO,DP). The trick will be in determining the weighted relationships between each parameter (per each consumer/provider pair).
FWIW - My bet is that there won’t be a one-size-fits-all equation, but rather a range of acceptable values based on context.
This is about 6 months old (so you may have already seen it), but when doing research for the DataPortability ProjectTimeline, I found this very clear and concise overview of OpenID:
There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but in case you’ve been scratching your head about OpenID (especially with all the recent news), this might help. And my guess is that even if you know all this, you probably know some folks who could use the primer.
This video might not be new to you… but given conversations I’ve had recently with folks deep in the tagging space, I thought it made sense to resurrect it.
Ya’ gotta’ love the “Pandora Like” checkout scene.
I’ve dabled with just about all the major collaborative bookmarking/tagging/link-sharing tools around. I put del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Technorati, etc. There are, of course, strengths and weaknesses of each one. The trick for me has been to integrate my use of them into my daily work stream.
Enter my new favorite class of tool: in-situ collaborative page annotation. I have no idea what others are calling them, but there ya’ go. I’m sure someone has come up with a clever Web 2.0 term, especially since mine is way too long.
Basically, these tools enable me to quickly and easily add my own notes to a page while reading it. The faster the tool works with only a few key clicks earns high marks in my book. Further, the more tracking / reporting / sharing functionality they have the better. For example, immediately after highlighting the pages I like to see the ability to immediately post my notes as a blog entry or otherise set it to track the page for changes.
The two tools that have floated to the top for me are Fleck and Diigo. My personal opinion having used both for a couple weeks now is that Diigo wins. While both have largely the same feature set, the RIA UI of Diigo really keeps me moving without waiting for page redraws. Further, they’re style guides associated with reading annotations (within their site, in a cross-post to a blog, or forwarded via email) are incredibly well designed.
The only downside I’ve found with Diigo so far is that it doesn’t automaticlly pick up the tags associated with the pages. It’d be a great feaure if they took a best guess based on the meta keywords in the header and let you modify them. Right now, though, it pre-populates the “tags” field with “no-tags” (and changing them requires a bit too many key clicks for my tastes).
As a side note, LibraryThing does a fantastic job of empowering the user to quickly and easily add tags to books in your library. Talk about great human factors (though minimal pretty pictures in their GUI)… in fact I’ll probably spend some time chatting that site up some time soon.
I realize I’m showing up (fashionably) late to the semantic web party, but the timing seems to feel ripe. As I mentioned in an earlier post about what I call a “Semantic Servant“, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to (easily) cross-connect online systems. Despite the zealot debates between the Web 2.0 / 3.0 / Semantic Web crowds, there’s a lot to be gained from cooperative growth.
For example, I found this post about “Pinging the Semantic Web” by Harry Chen. In it he mentions there’s a lot to be learned from the blog pinging services:
As the Semantic Web grows, we also need similar services. Ping.SemanticWeb.Org is an experimental service for notifying search engines (or semantic web bots) about changes made in semantic web documents. The present service accepts pings from semantic web documents that describe SIOC, FOAF and DOAP.
He goes on to give some rationale behind his belief in this type of system. My personal favorite is his second point:
Second, a wide adoption of ping services can help to speed up the convergence of standard ontologies. In the blogosphere, we have seen the convergence of few RSS standards, which I believe is due to the wide adoption of ping services, as well as RSS readers and blog publishing software. If Semantic Web ping services are widely used, I believe it’s only nature for SWD publishers to adopt few standard ontologies that are supported by the ping services, and not to create the owner ontologies.
As much as I hate to admit it, the semi-formalization of RSS did for online content sharing what HTML did for Internet content publishing in general. What I mean by that is sometimes it takes an example of technology deployed in a useful context to propel it into mainstream adoption. There’s no reason why we need RSS to share content (we could simply use straight XML, or even straight HTML), but it certainly makes it easier — especially if everyone adopts it.
Now, all we need to do is come up with “an example technology deployed in a useful context.” Piece of cake.
