There’s a lot of talk lately about ownership of content, but there isn’t a lot of substance. In this post I want to tell you what providers of Social Media Services should do to make things very, very clear for YOU regarding YOUR content.
It’s called Dataportability, and this is what it means.
Data portability is the ability for people to reuse their data across interoperable applications. The DataPortability Project works to advance this vision by identifying, contextualizing and promoting efforts in the space.
The fun thing about definitions is the fact there usually are many. The one I gave you is the one supported by the Dataportability Project in which I participate.
The key concept here is ‘who owns the data, and what can YOU do with it’. Companies should be perfectly clear in their communication about this so You know what to expect. That’s why we believe that they should have a portabilitypolicy, just as they have a privacy policy. (the privacy policy states what They can and will do with Your data). As an idea, it’s actually quite logical, don’t you think?
And this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be given any control over your data whatsoever, it just means that you should know what control you have. Then you can make educated choices which companies to be a client of. This, as many other things, is just a matter of selection.
To aid companies in creating these policies there is now a website with example policies for inspiration. There will be services to aid companies further in there efforts to create these policies in the future. This hopefully removes some of the barriers of getting this not only accepted as a good idea, but also implemented as a standard procedure. I guess you head overthere and give us some feedback, either on the dataportability google groups or (my personal preference ) here in the comments.
If you’re interested in following this fantastic project, be sure to read the Dataportability Blog.
Photo by .faramarzFreedom means control. control for me, control for the individual, not a large corporation, government institution or any other large body of people with any kind of hierarchical structure. Open means the same thing
Free software is all about freedom and all about control. the individual decides what he does with it, how he uses it, how he changes it and how he shares it. He even decides not to use it if he doesn’t want to for whatever reason. That’s freedom and that’s control. (where i write he, you could easily read she)
Open means the same thing. Open software, open standards, open data. it’s all about putting control where it should be, at the individual level, with the people themselves
I am very much in favour of freedom and open. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m very much against other ways because sometimes these ways suit some peoples needs, including my own. I would suggest that given the option, you should favour the open and free path over the non-open and non-free.
I recently became a fellow at the Free Software Foundation Europe to support Free and Open. Maybe you should to. My username over there is wkossen.
Photo by mattdorkThe day has come. It’s the official end of the floppy disk. Well, it isn’t just yet, but we’re really in it’s afterlife right now. If you’re still interested in one of the more interesting floppy based projects, stack up now! 1.44 MB isn’t really relevant anymore in these days of Terabytes, yet, the floppy was a great and very successful invention. I still have hundreds laying around containing relevant data and applications. It’s just too much work to move all that stuff to Cd’s or DVDs. I just wonder if this had anything to do with it…
This however isn’t the reason I am writing this post. There’s something else. I had a very good read today that I would not want to keep to myself. It’s the 2009 year report of Euro-IX, the organisation that bring together the Internet Exchanges of Europe. You can read it here. This really is a very interesting set of data. It tells you all sorts of figures about the Internet in Europe. Yes, really, figures. Mathematicians and Statisticians, please take notice, I’m talking significant data here. If you’re into graphs and tables, grab that PDF before it goes away.
One other thing Euro-IX did was release an educational film about the workings of the Internet. It’s not like Warriors of the Net, which already was brilliant, it’s the bigger picture. I’ll embed it here, it’s that good! So if you always wanted to know what an Internet Exchange actually is and didn’t want to head over to Wikipedia, click play below!.
Photo by tripuEspecially if they contain words… Infographics has been an emerging trend for some time now. And there are very nice examples on the web. It’s a way of putting together a bit of content in a very discriptive manner. And making it look good, very good. I mentioned one earlier
I found this page that contains 50 nice and unique examples. I hope these provide inspiration to you.
If you know of other great infographics, don’t hesitate to comment and mention the links!
Photo by Badly Drawn DadI don’t know if it’s just instinct, but we humans have this sincere need to limit the amount of variation in anything we do. Ever sincy we started to live in stationary communities and worked our way up to professional farmers, we have been trying to eliminate variation as much as possible. Selecting the finest crop and weeding out the bad ones.
When after many centuries a certain Mr. Darwin explained to us that evolution actually depends on variation, nobody wanted to believe him. And we still don’t. Yet nature does what nature does best, defy human efforts towards standardization. And somehow we do the same. We come up with new stuff regularly and we call it progress.
But every time something new comes up, certain people start crying out that ‘this will replace that’, ‘this will win over that’ or ‘this must be phased out because of that’ etc.. It is a habit we’re born with, comparing things and classifying them as either good or bad. Recently I saw another example on LinkedIN Answers. Someone asked the community there whether PHP will win over .NET. I can’t help but feel a bit annoyed. Why can’t different species coexist and share an ecosystem where both can prosper? Why should the whole IT landscape be a monoculture?
And of course, it shouldn’t. Monocultures have significant disadvantages. We have seen that in agriculture a lot of times. One disease figures out a way to attack a certain crop and because of the monoculture kills every single plant or animal. This sort of thing has caused famine, disease and mass migration in humans and still does from time to time. Monocultures are vulnerable because the variation in disease resistance that occurs naturally has been selected away. This gives viruses and other pests a good chance to have an impact. Did you wonder why computerviruses are called just that? And why do they thrive in ‘monoculture’-IT-Landscapes?
In fact, there are more links to biology in the IT terminology field. How about bugs?
what about farms. What about LifeCycles, In fact we are also using biology-derived scientific fields like Taxonomy for IT related things as well.
We have these ‘climate-change’ like discussions on Google Chrome versus Microsoft Internet Explorer, and about Linux versus Windows. We have the Evolutionists versus the Religion-buffs when it comes to different development platforms. I guess there’s nothing new in IT when it comes to these subjects. So maybe, just maybe, we should learn a thing or to from biology, agriculture, and most of all history. Maybe variation isn’t a bad thing after all, maybe it brings stability while actually supporting us best. Maybe standardization aimed at minimizing variety is at least in part a bad choice that should be made carefully. Maybe we should ‘relearn’ choosing in the first place. (And I’ll come back to that in another post, promise!).
Photo by Neil CrosbyYup, another predictions post. Like you, I can’t wait to see what this year is going to bring. Let’s try a few predictions on 2010.
HTML5 is going to be something really big one day. Will it happen in 2010? I think so. But it depends on one big monopolistic Goliath mainly. Will Microsoft add HTML5 support to it’s browser platform? I don’t have the answer on that one. HTML5 is what will make most of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight rather obsolete. (and good riddens). Very promising technology! Read the rest of this entry »
I recently came across a post on this weblog via this weblog about printers. I just think it’s hilarious therefor I will share the link here. Again, it’s about printers. You may have had your unfortunate experiences with those in the past… Check the article out here. Hey, if you’re finished laughing, don’t hesitate to leave me a comment as well…. Photo by topherous
Photo by eir@siLast year around this time i posted a blog with predictions. Let’s see if I got it right…
Windows 7 came and was an instant hit. I didn’t think things would move so fast. I guess people were more fed up with Vista then I expected. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by fczuardiThe Software License and the EULA (End User License Agreement) have always been part of software. It contains the rights people have regarding the software, often limiting those rights as much as possible. It’s being a contractual document, Eula’s often contain a lot of legal jargon, which usually is gibberish to ordinary human beings. The question is, do they have to be this difficult to read? Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Yme BosmaYes, My invite came this last night. Between bits of work I found a little bit of time to play with it a few minutes. And I am not (yet) very impressed. Sure it works and sure it’s fast. Sure I can create a wave (which isn’t much more than a simple document) and have a conversation. But there are problems that wave doesn’t solve yet, promises that aren’t kept.
) here in the comments.
