Throughout the blogosphere we see many discussions regarding "who owns my data" and the Robert Scoble story only inflamed the debate. It seems that users of the social web are indeed forming in "swarms" and creating their own initiatives to protect us from others owning our data. BTW, Robert Scolbe is one of the contributors to the following initiative.

Any initiative called "Data Portability" has been started aimed at enabling users to gain control over their data throughout the social web.

DataPortability gathers existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remix able web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go. Find out more at dataportability.org

The Philosophy: As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

The Mission To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

1. We want sovereignty over the profiles, relationships, content and media we create and maintain. We want open formats, protocols and policies for identity discovery, data import, export and sync
2. We will provide a reference design to the community which will enable Data Portability
3. We intend to invent or re-invent as little as possible
4. We want the reference design to be as simple as possible
5. We plan to promote that reference design and have it adopted across as many apps as possible
6. Politics can stay at the door

The above initiative is a perfect example of how conversations do indeed fuel innovation. This also represents the power of the social web ultimately being in the hands of the users to create solutions to problems in today networking environments.

Stay tuned for the next innovations designed and deployed by we, the people.

What say you?

see video introduction below

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="225" data="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=610179&amp;server=www.vimeo.com&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color="> <param name="quality" value="best" /> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> <param name="scale" value="showAll" /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=610179&amp;server=www.vimeo.com&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=" /></object><br /><a href="http://www.vimeo.com/610179/l:embed_610179">DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix</a> from <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/smashcutmedia/l:embed_610179">Smashcut Media</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/l:embed_610179">Vimeo</a>.