DataPortability looks set to massively increase the value of the Net to users

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Over the last few weeks excitement has been mounting over the DataPortability movement, which has a mission of giving users control over their data. It brings together a range of existing initiatives, including APML, OpenID, RSS, and others to enable personal data to be shared between applications and vendors. The initiative is spearheaded by Chris Saad, with a broad global team involved, and rapidly growing membership of the group.

The latest hot news is that Microsoft is joining the DataPortability group. Other recent new participants include Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr. Many of the big names in technology and other key social networking sites are believed to be on the verge of announcing their participation. Critical mass is essential for this kind of initiative; it now seems to have reached the point at which this is likely to become a true industry-wide initiative. The media attention DataPortability is getting, including from mainstream press such as the Financial Times, shows this is not just a geek thing.

Last year I wrote many times and about the trend to openness on the web, and the reinvigoration of the concept of infomediaries. Several commentators have suggested that DataPortability is one of the most important initiatives on the web for 2008. The issue is absolutely a defining one for where the information economy goes, and the momentum on the initiative just in the first month of the year suggests that the group will bring together the energy the community has in making data portable.

If we look at the really big picture of the Internet, a large part of what is holding back value to users is how applications are fragmenting people’s data and attention. Having true data portability would make the Net far easier to use and far more valuable to people. Just the last year or two has convinced me that people believe they should control their own data. The Net is inevitably going to follow those desires. It’s looking like DataPortability is going to be a central mechanism in this transformative shift in the online world.

Michael Pick has created a neat 2 minute video explaining the key concepts of DataPortability – see below.


DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

User Filtered Content (UFC) is what Web 2.0 is about… and Digg is a UFC site

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At the Crunchy awards last week Digg was named best User Generated Content (UGC) site. As many people pointed out since then, Digg is in fact not a user generated content site, since the people don’t submit content to the site, but links to other sites.

Allen Stern suggests that Digg is a UGC aggregator. Josh Catone thinks that UGC is perfectly accurate for Digg.

Back in 2006 I posted the notes to my speech at the Influence conference on Web 2.0 and User Filtered Content, pointing out that Web 2.0 is largely about users collectively filtering content after they have generated it. Earlier in the year the content section of our Future of Media Strategic Framework showed how both media and users create and filter content. Creating and filtering content are different activities.

contentframework.jpg

I think it’s well time that User Filtered Content comes into its own as a term, and isn’t confused with User Generated Content.

Revisiting the top 60 Web 2.0 applications in Australia for 2007

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Back in May 2007 ReadWriteWeb posted my list of the Top 60 Web 2.0 applications in Australia, which we created as a prelude to our Web 2.0 in Australia event.

I’m reposting the list now, partly as the full list is no longer available from the ReadWriteWeb site for some reason, and also because I will be updating the list soon.

Click here for the full list of the Top 60 Web 2.0 applications in Australia – 2007.

The first update I will make – hopefully in the next couple of weeks – is simply an alphabetical list of the 25 or so additional interesting applications I have come across since the list was posted.

Then in a few months I will release the top Web 2.0 apps list for 2008, again scanning the landscape to see what’s out there, and coming up with a highly subjective ranking of their prominence by selected criteria (Web 2.0 characteristics; coolness/ innovation; maturity; and commercial success/ number of users).

Over the last weeks there have been numerous rumors that our #1 pick for last year, Omnidrive, is in trouble, though their website and forum are currently up and running. CEO Nik Cubrilovic says that the company is profitable and problems are simply from being too busy, so let’s wait and see what the reality is. Most of the rest of the top 10 have flourished, and a number of apps lower in the list are now strong contenders for top places. Overall the development of the companies on the list has been extremely healthy.

Our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 19 February will focus more on what is happening in applying Web 2.0 applications inside the firewall. We may run some kind of Australian Web 2.0 awards or showcase later in the year, depending on our organizational bandwidth.

Please let me know if there are other interesting Australian Web 2.0 apps I should be aware of for our next lists.

Interview on SBS TV World news tonight: How Skype changes how telecom firms add value

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I’ve just been interviewed by SBS TV for a segment on Skype, which will air on their World News tonight at 6:30pm. There was no particular news that prompted the segment, which simply looks at what Skype is, and in particular how it is impacts the telecommunications industry.

In the interview I repeatedly emphasized how telecommunications companies have for over a century dramatically overcharged for communication, holding back progress, business, and personal relationships. Only now that there is a free alternative are international phone calls getting a fraction closer to their actual cost. Connectivity is a human and social right, which fortunately is now available to anyone with an Internet connection or who can afford 30 minutes in an Internet café. In order for telecommunications companies to continue to be as vastly profitable as they have over the years, they must find news ways of creating value. One way is to add value to the basic connectivity services they provide. Another is to shift into adjacent businesses such as content, services, or to leverage their existing relationships into new areas.

Last year I wrote about some of the strategic issues for how telecommunications firms reposition themselves, in the context of mobile search. I’ll expand on this theme anon.

The attack of the killer online clones: how to keep ahead

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The availability of online services exchanges has been changing the nature of the online development business for a couple of years. Over two years ago in a blog post titled The rise of online services exchanges I described how sites such as elance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com, and getafreelancer.com were globalizing services and tech development, and rapidly commoditizing fees to get work done.

Today Techcrunch has written about someone in Turkey who is asking on getafreelancer.com for a clone of Tangler.com, and is willing to pay $1500 for it. In an interesting coincidence, I caught up with Martin Wells, CEO of Tangler, at an event at Stanford University on Thursday evening, and we were talking about the online service exchanges, though more with a bent to getting work done.

Daniel on DRM finds other people looking for clones of Digg, eBay, Twitter and other leading online sites. I’m surprised that this is seen as noteworthy. None of this is new. Well over a year ago I saw over a dozen requests for Digg clones on Rentacoder. Has this resulted in the demise of Digg? Hardly. There are a few factors at play here.

The first is what the commentators today have focused on: the bidders are rather unlikely to create a worthwhile clone of these online sites for what they are getting paid. It shouldn’t be too hard to emulate a fairly simple site like Digg, though the rich functionality of Tangler is a bit more of a handful. Certainly you can’t expect robust, quality code at this kind of price.

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Interview on Sky Business on Enterprise 2.0 and social networks in organizations

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I will be interviewed on Sky Business tomorrow (Friday) evening on the use of Facebook and other social networks in organizations, and the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 as a driver of how companies function.

As soon as I find out what time the segment will be on I’ll post it here. I’ll also make a few notes on the interview. Good that these topics are getting finally more solid attention.

[Update:] Sky Business’s Business Report will air my interview between 8.30 and 9pm on Nov 2

The State of the Nation in Australian emerging technology

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Chris Saad, the hyper-energetic co-founder of Particls, Engagd, APML, Media 2.0 Workgroup and probably many other interesting initiatives I haven’t had the time to hear about yet, has added to his plate editing Blognation Australia. Blognation is a very interesting set of blogs covering technology developments in 13 countries, which can be used to provide country-specific or an aggregated global view into what’s happening in technology.

To launch Blognation Australia Chris has written a State of the Nation: Australia post, which provides a fantastic overview of the state of emerging technologies in Australia, covering People, Companies, Capital, Politics, and Leadership/ Community. The intention of the blog is cover Australian start-ups with a global perspective.

It’s well worth reading the full post, however here are a couple of extracts:

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Microsoft teams up to improve its Enterprise 2.0 offering

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Microsoft has just announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that it is partnering with Atlassian on its enterprise wiki product Confluence and Newsgator on its newly released Newsgator Social sites, which is “a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware”. Both products will be integrated into Sharepoint.

This is a very interesting announcement on a number of fronts. It shows that Microsoft recognizes that its Enterprise 2.0 offering (what Microsoft calls “social computing”) needs bolstering. Sharepoint is fundamentally a collaboration and document management system, and in fact provides both the underlying capabilities and many of the functionalities required in applying Web 2.0 approaches inside the enterprise. However these are not always easy to set up and use, which is a requisite of Web 2.0 technologies. For example, since Sharepoint is among other things a richly-featured document management system, wiki-style functionality is a core part of the offering. However it is not an out-of-the-box capability, meaning administrators usually need to configure the setup, at least in the first case. RSS, another staple of Enterprise 2.0, can be enabled in any Sharepoint document. However again this is not an intuitive end-user function.

In this case, Microsoft is choosing to partner with leading companies in the space. Atlassian was featured as one of our five showcased companies at our Web 2.0 in Australia event, and ranked second on my list of top 60 Web 2.0 Apps in Australia earlier this year. Atlassian is the leader in enterprise wikis, saying 4,000 organizations globally using their wiki product. Its ease of use is one of the major advantages over the current Sharepoint wiki offering.

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Newsgator implements APML: the value of standards in an open world

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Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML), the standard for sharing attention profiles that I wrote about recently, has received a major boost today. The prominent RSS aggregator Newsgator has announced that it is implementing APML, while Engagd reports that a range of significant players are joining the APML working group, including social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia, feed reader Bloglines, online application provider Peepel, social recommendation tool Me.dium, and the semantic content platform Talis.

The diversity of the new participants in APML points to some of the value of the standard. Starting from the more obvious applications, APML can be implemented by any news aggregator or feed reader to provide personalized, relevant information to the user. Those aggregators that provide this extra level of value will be more useful. One of the most interesting emerging spaces at the moment is that of social browsing recommendations. I wrote a few months ago about Cluztr, a website that gathers complete data about everything that users do online, including every site that they click on and how long they spend there. One of the most valuable things that emerges is the ability to find what is most interesting to people with similar interest (or attention) profiles to yourself. Clearly appropriate security and boundaries to the use of the data are required, but given that, extremely personalized recommendations can be made. Me.dium provides a related service, overlaying the browsing recommendations with a social network that enables users to link to people with similar interest profiles.

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Why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term

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A couple of months ago when I was spending a few packed days of meetings up and down the 101 in Silicon Valley, several people asked me about Web 3.0. I told them pointedly what I thought, and at the time I determined to write a blog post on why Web 3.0 is a meaningless term, but never got around to it.

This seems worth coming back to, since Jason Calacanis has just proferred his own definition: “Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”

Which is a fabulous illustration of my point: that when people refer to Web 3.0, it means whatever they want it to mean. In other words it’s a meaningless term until the point that there is a reasonable degree of common understanding of its meaning, so it can be used in a sentence and actually convey something.

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