jaffamonkey

I really like what is going on right now. web 2.0 I felt was marred by transient fashion, but now the big boys are in, and suddenly web 2.0 technologies is making total sense. As a firm advocate of anti-centralisation, the DataPortability Workgroup agenda hits the nail of the head for me ..

• 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
• We will provide a reference design to the community which will enable Data Portability
• We intend to invent or re-invent as little as possible
• We want the reference design to be as simple as possible
• We plan to promote that reference design and have it adopted across as many apps as possible
• Politics can stay at the door

http://dataportability.pbwiki.com/

This is the project I am planning to contribute to, which is running inconjunction with dataportability workgroup. The project is called The GraphSync Project - below is an extract from the site - visit and get involved! 

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it… Pick a proprietary silo of user’s personal social data Write some open source code to extract their data Place their data into the open formats listed below. Link to the code repository on the DataPortability Wiki. Win the love and admiration of a grateful community

 I have has a little forray into this myself, just using a service from Clustr, which transforms APML profile data into a tag cloud.  The APML file I am using is held, generated and downloadble from www.engagd.com.  Now time to get my hands dirty and contribute back into the growing community.   Included in AMPL format is ranking data, generated by ItemRank service.  By feeding  your APML file into API, it will return that content filtered and ranked by Personal Relevancy.  This data would prove useful if applied to more intelligent social networking model - connecting you atuomatically into networks of web users will matching/similar profiles.

I have latched onto APML, which I consider personally to be the best for web user profiling, and already many services exist to generate and manipulate APML data. What is this project for? The Graphsync project also summarised an often forgotten principle of the internet, freedom and privacy.

Because users own their own data and therefore need a way to get to it.