Hank Williams in his blog, “why does everything suck?“, wrote today about being in Blogger jail, and his desire as a blogger to disassociate the platform from the content (whether articles or comments).

A heated discussion started a couple of weeks ago on social data portability – we wrote a bunch of things at the time following the news – you can find the posts in this blog.

Hank’s plea for a more open environment for bloggers where information could flow is no different from the discussions on social data and their portability. Both advocate for an environment where platforms and data are kept separate.

This is of course a scary idea for most businesses out there trying to create an “unfair competitive advantage” (I hate this idea btw) by raising the threshold of switching services – not so different from your cell phone provider trying to make your life difficult to switch service. I’m not going to go too far down that path as this is a whole other article I’ll probably post on the Ignesis blog.

We wrote a few weeks back a post called “Who owns my data? What really matters is who controls it!” advocating that users should be on the forefront of (re)claiming their data and push for open standards. We are on the right track with so many services starting to emerge using RSS feeds and APIs to aggregate user data to provide stats to the user, like TubeMogul, assess performance, like Traackr, or simply enable central upload of content, like Oosha.

The loop is not fully closed yet but the trend is getting enough momentum to become hard to stop.

Tags: dataportability, friendsconnect, hankwilliams, oosha, traackr, tubemogul

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under We Search, We Score, We Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.