Data Portability - Overview and Introduction

I am formulating my thoughts around data portability and how it will affect life as I continue to become 100% web-based in my work and personal life. I thought as I am working through it I would talk about here and help users understand their data portability, the standards and why it is important to have.

So this first post I guess is about what is data portability. So in this Web 2.0 world we are increasingly interacting with other people and services online. Our data is spread all over the place. I create a profile at probably 1 site a week and sometimes more. I also publish photos, images, news, blogs, comments, and much more all over the place.

All this information represents me and who I am. I shouldn't have to repeat myself at each site and I should retain some sort of ownership or accessibility to my data.

This is where data portability comes in. My profile information as well as the content I publish on the Internet should be portable and I should be able to move from site to site and / or back it up and keep it on my machine at home.

The are several standards for data portability I will be talking about next such as APML, OpenID, Microformats, RDF, RSS, OPML, and Oauth. You can find information about all these standards at http://www.dataportability.org/