• Are You Paying Attention?: VIDEO PROJECT – Share your thoughts about DataPortability
  (tags: dataportability video attention project)
• Like it? Tip it!
  not bad idea. check out FAQ for how they make money
  (tags: tipit application content blogging business tip)

• YouTube – Dataportability.org Marc Canter
  (tags: marccanter dataportability.org video)
• Question.. why RSS and not Atom (Standard)? – DataPortability.Public.General | Google Groups
  dataportability.org standard should be based on functionality not just popularity.
  (tags: atom RSS dataportability standards technology)
• Rss20AndAtom10Compared – Atom Wiki
  RSS 2.0 and Atom compared. the important bit is in ‘payload’ section
  (tags: atom RSS standards feed technology)

The openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! — possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.

- Yahoo! and the future of the internet, The official Google blog. via Doc

• Twitter to monetize by credit based system?
  (tags: twitter monetisation applications web jaiku)
• Data Property Rights, Not Portability – GigaOM
  This is really an excellent take on the issue, adding to the wave on which VRM should ride.
  (tags: dataportability.org VRM gigaom propertyrights data internet user)
• Are You Paying Attention?: VIDEO – DataPortabilityAndMe – Chris Saad Responds
  seems like dataportability.org is aiming higher than just moving data around. again, interesting to see the ‘wave’ around data and ownership gathering momentum
  (tags: dataportabilty.org chrissaad VRM attention)
• Vertical Search Provider Healthline Beefs Up Content, Features
  (tags: health search tools applications JNJ)
• The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing
  social media don’t monetise? how arrogant to say that social media doesn’t work if companies can’t make money out of it. It works for me!
  (tags: socialmedia business search web traffic eyeballs)
• eFoundations: Graphs, networks, terminology, etc (or, hey, hey, I’m a monkey)
  thinking on social graph. “Fundamentally, the network is the sum of our living, changing relationships. The graph is a representation of the relationships. Network is to person as graph is to snapshot.” Like it.
  (tags: socialgraph socialnetwork communities terminology fitzpatrick dataportability)
• Pirated by iTunes, Artist Turns to BitTorrent | TorrentFreak
  it is about the artist’s choice. interesting how iTunes ’steals’ music from the artist. surprise it hasn’t cause more uproar.
  (tags: BitTorrent iTunes benjordan privacy radiohead music downloads torrentfreak)

• Best Buy sued for losing laptop (Scripting News)
  the arrogance
  (tags: identity theft laptop davewiner data privacy bestbuy)

I believe that VRM starts with you being able to take charge of your data – data that you want to capture, analyse and otherwise harness, both for fun or for usefulness.

At the moment you are the last person to be able to benefit from your data on various platforms and from your ‘digital detritus’ – information that others harvest and use for their own purposes. A site with tools like wesabe may give you the ability to gather and analyse some of your financial data, but you’ll need new tools – free from platform lock-ins – to repeat that trick with data regarding anything else about which you care and need.

Obviously, to make the most of your new-found data autonomy, you will also need to be able to communicate, share and transact that data with others, individuals and vendors.

So there are two foundation stones for the VRM vision as described above:

1. the place where you store, manage and play with your data (working name: u-spot)
2. the methods (protocols, standards, etc) for sharing, exchanging and distributing that information, if you so wish.

Having had many discussions on this matter I wanted to share some of the ideas they generated. With Alec’s technical expertise and support we were able to articulate a vision of how people could interact with vendors in a VRM manner using existing online technology – a white paper was born, rivetingly named “Feeds-Based VRM”: A Web-Centric Approach to VRM Implementation

The goals for this paper were to:

• invent as little as possible
• reuse only popular technologies, techniques and user-interface metaphors in order to enable VRM, and…
• provide maximal inclusiveness and extensibility to the VRM implementation, to permit the greatest potential for growth.

…and within these simple constraints we have proposed a simple, inexpensive, viable path for VRM u-spot implementation and information sharing, using familiar technologies such as blogs, feeds, ATOM, and RSS.

Technical outline: the feeds-based VRM concept is for you to be able to manage, manipulate and share information – e.g. hotels you have visited, flights you have taken, wines you have enjoyed – using a pluggable web-based software platform similar to Wordpress or Movable Type; however unlike those tools which deal with free-form blog posts, instead your data is be stored as objects (encoded in pertinent open-standards formats) which are then “shared” via secure, self-referential, closed and authenticated ATOM or RSS feeds that can be read, aggregated or further processed by “subscribers” whom you authorize via your “friends list”.

The effect is: your data is held in one place and is authoritative. Your subscribers can see it. When you change it, your subscribers will see the changes.

No longer will you need to tell people when you change your address. They’ll already know.

Notes:
Many thanks to Ben and Kevin for helpful comments. This is a contribution to an open source project to develop a web-centric VRM infrastructure.
The title reference is to the original post Power to the Persons!

• Doctors balk at request for data – Los Angeles Times
  another example of bad relationship between customer and vendor. if you have to break fundamental trust between doctor and a patient to ‘prevent fraud’ something’s wrong with the business.
  (tags: health data insurance patients doctors privacy ownership VRM)
• Minnesota Web Site Could Overhaul Health Care Marketplace – iHealthBeat
  making it easy to compare health care providers and cost of their services. it’s the first step to getting the industry used to the power of the customer but a far cry from where the relationship needs to be
  (tags: healthcare providers carol.com patients customers VRM)
• Poor man’s Contact List portability – DataPortability.Action.Technical | Google Groups
  good points about current contacts portability and gmail as a proxy service. not secure and shouldn’t be used. better standards, security and authentication called for
  (tags: contacts gmail google portability oauth standards autheticantion)

• Pirates and bloggers beat China’s great wall of propaganda | Technology | The Guardian
  government censors- “t is becoming more difficult to block and monitor web traffic so we need to switch to guidance”. so more auto-censorship and propaganda – good luck
  (tags: china market piracy censorship propaganda)
• Quantifying the Impact of Social Media: Where the Edelman White Paper Got it Right, Got it Wrong and What We Should Do Next
  yawn really. social media dissolving to the ‘how people are and interact’ sea, just like ‘bloggers’ are people who write online. strange limbo for social web – between PR/media types and anthropologist getting both ends of stick wrong.
  (tags: socialmedia whitepaper edelman)
• Tomski.com – Don’t own a TV? You might still need a TV licence..
  is BBC grasping to license every device capable of streaming live broadcast, i.e. your computer. truly scary we even need to have this argument.
  (tags: bbc license fee live broadcast PC computer)
• BBC iPlayer gets (a little bit) better
  from my own experience iPlayer does suck. For many reasons.
  (tags: iPlayer BBC online broadcast)
• SpikedHumor.com » Rowan Atkinson – Invisible Drum Kit » SpikedHumor.com
  (tags: humour rowanatkinson drums video)
• Neil Gaiman – Neil Gaiman’s Journal: The Birthday Thing
  vote for which book to make freely available online. My choice ‘Neverwhere’.
  (tags: neilgaiman book download free birthday neverwhere)
• BBC iPlayer – why DRM? – Bods’s Blog | Planet Bods
  that Microsoft have infiltrated the BBC through former staff members like Erik Huggers (who is the bloke in overall charge of the iPlayer team, but it must be said, was certainly not invol…
  sharedcopy: http://r1.sharedcopy.com/49a162qp#shcp1
  (tags: feb_08 planetbods.org)
• Internet pirates could be banned from web – Telegraph
  and the dying dinosaur keeps threshing about
  (tags: piracy download ISP music industry law ban)
• Government plans to make ISPs ban downloaders : February 2008 : Shane Richmond : Technology : Telegraph Blogs
  sums up what I think about the BPI’s announcement to ban people who download music from the internet
  (tags: music download industry ban internet BPI)
• Anonymous Surfing: How to Conceal Your Digital Identity While Online
  some useful tools, what with ISP going to spy on you…
  (tags: privacy proxy ISP online)
• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Radiohead album crowns US chart
  even with free download available the band still tops the US chart
  (tags: radiohead download music charts)
• SiliconValley.com – Upset eBay users threaten boycott
  changes in charges are not accepted by the seller, boycott ensues. can they make any impact?
  (tags: ebay boycott sellers online)

A great presentation by Kevin Marks on social cloud. The cloud is an abstraction that we create of the net. It is the perception of the network, the internet, by people who no longer see or need to think of all the piping and wires. Those are in the background, invisible to most of us.

There are several important points that Kevin makes but here’s a taster.

The younger generation doesn’t see the cloud, it experiences it as oxygen supporting their digital lives. The older generation sees this as a poisonous gas that has leaked out of their pipes, and they want to seal it up again.

Another important bit is the one about our brains and minds being the best social networking tools. Software cannot match out ability to sort out our friends and contact, establish how much we trust them and how we arrive at that trust. No software can fully map the relationships, let alone replace our natural ability to create and maintain them The implication is that therefore software should support the kind of cloud abstraction we have around the internet, also around our social relationships. You can feed it (the social networking app) relationships that are in the ’software in your head’, feed the stuff related to people in your network to software online. Users will assume that your software (this is aimed at developers) will be able to see the information that they have already fed into the software and be able to use it. (Please watch the whole thing as I hardly did full justice to Kevin’s talk.)

This skirts the edges of what I see in VRM – tools and software enabling me to take charge of my relationships by helping me with the data around them, their capture and manipulation. The cloud is abstraction of my relationships but before it recedes into the invisible strata I need to be able to breathe freely. The starting point is having healthy lungs and not having to worry about the tubes and the mechanics of breathing. And we are far from that.

At the moment, we are all connected to the matrix, with tubes still being more important than our freedom to move. The many silo-like platforms try to keep us hooked and locked in, whilst giving us enough delusion of capabilities. Alas, there is only so many times you can (super)poke or zombie someone before you start wondering what’s the point.

The point is I want to be able to hook or unhook myself at will. I want to be able to connect and create relationships without lock-ins (other than the ones that relationships bring with them naturally ). I don’t believe I will be able to do that unless the tools are built around me, for me and eventually by me. Blogging took off when people could set up a page and start publishing in a way previously available only to geeks with html skillz. Today I can do more things with my blog than just publish – tag, add videos, plug-in more functionality etc. with the underlying technology is invisible to me now.

I want tools and applications that will help me do that with my relationships (as social network platforms are rather inadequate for my purposes) and ultimately transactions.

One of the fundamental building blocks of VRM is the ability of individual users to take charge of their data instead of managing them via a platform and ‘trading’ that data for the functionality that the platform might provide. Once I have it in my hands, I can manage, analyse and whatever else I wish to do with them, applying various functionality directly. And share and interact with others in ways richer than platforms currently allow. It might be messier to start with but closer to human affairs in its complexity. And that is a Good Thing.

Apologies to Kevin for hijacking the cloud imagery.

• Lift conferences, webcams & interviews
  flash interface, cannot link directly to the video. bookmarking the presentation by Kevin Marks
  (tags: kevinmarks lift08 socialcloud socialnetworks presentation video)
• MySpace Clips Facebook In January, But Both Slowing – Silicon Alley Insider
  January comScore numbers show some audience metrics ticking up — and in many cases, outpacing rival Facebook. The bad news for both social networks: Those same numbers still indicate that American users, at least, may be reaching social network fatigue.
  (tags: myspace activity visits socialnetwork trends)

• The TrueTalk Blog: Is Marketing A Discipline In Crisis?
  the emperor is skinny dippin’
  (tags: marketing monetise business model google socialnetwork socialweb)
• 23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics
  (tags: genome genetics science google wired 23AndMe)

• Facebook to Punish Stupid Applications, Reward Good Ones – ReadWriteWeb
  and this is supposed to fix the frustration with facebook apps? yeah right. platform wars? yawn.
  (tags: facebook platform applications notification myspace)
• Facebook Begins Suggesting Friends? – The Unofficial Facebook Blog
  is this a way of addressing the issue of discovery? not sure, but let’s see
  (tags: facebook application friend contact socialnetwork discovery)