Data Portability Archive

Social news aggregator Digg has announced several enhancements to their DataPortability support. Digg’s Steve Williams provides an overview of the updates which include:

– XFN Friends Network access – this lets other services tie-into your friends on Digg

– hCard access – this is basically your business card – allows other machines to read your Digg profile for the juicy bits of personal info

– They’ve also added RDFa, which Wikipedia explains "allows you to annotate XHTML markup with semantics."

These steps are a good move forward for DataPortability. It’s not exactly how I’d define DP but it’s a good step for Digg to make.

The DataPortability group has selected the new logo which they are calling a "trustmark" today. The logo contest saw 400 logo submissions reviewed by a panel of judges and voted by 4,562 people. The winner is located on the left — not sure what to think about it at this point. It seems to show movement in and movement out which is a good thing. If you are at the Web 2.0 Expo, they will be handing out stickers with the new logo today.

Chris Saad, DataPortability group leader shared with me some additional updates as the group has reached the six-month milestone:

• Creation of the DIY (Do It Yourself Data Portability) Club
• Creating formal networks and informal outreach, such as the DataPortability Video Project and the DataPortability InMotion Prodcast Series, which invites people to describe what data portability means to them
• Published technical paper stubs for the first batch of documents

Lastly, here’s the group’s new tagline: DataPortability Connect.Control.Share.Remix

Web buzz tracking service BuzzLogic has announced the acquisition of Activeweave today. When I interviewed BuzzLogic, I called them the corporate Technorati (that actually works). They explain the BuzzLogic service as: BuzzLogic changes this dynamic (influence) by uniquely defining and measuring influence in social media, and by surfacing the key influencers who are shaping and defining markets, issues and reputations.

Today they are acquiring Activeweave, makers of BlogRovr which is a browser plugin that helps to identify posts you might be interested in based on your interests. I spoke with the new team last week regarding the acquisition and while they couldn’t share the acquisition price, they did explain that the combined company will target, "conversational marketing." The plugin has 80,000 active users and 200,000 blogs (we are one) are in the BlogRovr network.

The latest tool from BuzzLogic is conversational advertising — that is helping companies to put advertising right where the conversation is using Google AdWords and other ad networks. We wrote about this advertising option late last year and said it’s a game changer. With the Activeweave acquisition, this program should expand into even more blogs and verticals.

Both companies are based in San Francisco and the new company has 27 employees.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a lengthy look into DataPortability regarding the BlogRovr service.

If the topic of Data Portability has been tough to understand, Danny Ayers has created a song called, "Get Your Data Out". It’s a rock song and while the words don’t rhyme like the SEO Rapper, it’s a pretty good song. It’s catchy and the middle 90 seconds show you a variety of apps and their data portability structures (or lack of). Here’s hoping that Danny sings it live at the next DP summit. Danny says that the semantic Web is the new rock and roll. Here’s Danny’s video:

It was about this time yesterday that we noted that RedHat went after the DataPortability workgroup for a similar logo. While the logos are not similar enough to create a claim in my opinion, the DP workgroup has taken Techcrunch’s suggestion to create a user-generated logo contest. The official name is the, “DataPortability Logo Competition.”

Sounds like a variety of companies have offered prizes and we will offer one-month of free advertising on either CN or HTMLCenter (winner’s choice).

This could be a great way for the topic of data portability to reach past the tech bloggers/journalists. And for the designers who enter, it’s an awesome way to get your name out.

And at the very least RedHat has received some very negative community buzz in the last day.

From the What The Fu** department, RedHat has sent a cease and desist (c&d for you home gamers) to the DataPortability workgroup for logo infringement. You see, RedHat uses a symbol that looks like the one to the left. The Data Portability logo is a dark D plus a light P combined to look like "infinity".  You can read the entire complaint here.

My opinion: the logos look nothing alike to me.

Marshall Kirkpatrick shows a picture of a pretzel in the shape of the RedHat logo. I just went to Times Square and food cart operators were closing up due to fear of a C&D on the pretzels they sell. No one wanted to speak on camera in fear of their safety.

Former attorney and Techcrunch owner Mike Arrington notes, "The ideas are what’s important – the logo is irrelevant…Have a contest and let fans create a new logo for you." I agree with Mike and would hope that the contest would allow anyone to enter and the judging would be fair and wouldn’t just pick a "friend of DP". Could be a good way to get the word out about DP past the geek bloggers.

Maybe RedHat is just pissed after today’s Microsoft announcement? We’ve seen how pissy bloggers handle things – they attack. Maybe this is the way pissy operating systems companies handle things.

In all seriousness, c’mon RedHat, let’s make more great products, not worry about a logo. Here are the logos for reference:

We’ve written about DataPortability before, most recently we wondered what DataPortability means after watching a video by a Plaxo employee. Today that DataPortability group has posted a list of what it is, and what it isnt:

What DataPortability Is:

• Formalizing the discussion of what a users rights are over their data (?)
• Group is made up of individuals, companies, and organizations
• Output of DP Project is freely available
• Will define "Data Portability" generally and within context of the project
• Will help to normalize terminology used within the Data Portability space
• Will help to syncronize efforts across other Data Portability projects.
• Advocacy for Best Practices in Data Portabililty space.
• Using existing technologies, stitching them together.
• Going to define a vision for the future.
• Going to define capabilities, not technical solutions
• About research and education

What DataPortability Is Not:

• An advocacy for a single technology solution
• Developing new technology solution.
• Going to force data into the public that shouldn’t be
• A legal entity providing legal-level precision.
• Currently end-user focused

Not end-user focused? Isnt’t that the whole point of Data Portability?