With an increasing dependence on distributed software, and web-based applications the portability of personal and corporate data is becoming an increasingly important issue for all users, but more so for web workers in particular.

Open Data philosophies have begun to coalesce around essays such as the speculative Data Bill Of Rights and the emerging Data Portability movement, web-based services that support portability are still quite rare and invariably the exception to the rule.

Services such as Flickr, del.icio.us and Gmail do allow data extraction of sorts; indeed Gmail’s support for IMAP was apparently motivated by the desire for data portability and enabling users freely import and export messages. Conversely, Microsoft announced that it would end offline Outlook support for Hotmail, effectively imprisoning user’s messages inside Microsoft services, without even a paid for option for IMAP or POP access.

Technicalities aside - portability is really about ethics and ownership. In an marketplace where users are directly contributing assets to the success of a service, we need to be able to assert ownership over those contributions and demand mechanisms to support that ownership.

(more at URL)

This demonstrates the substrata of developers and builders who have been using the newly emerging web tools in testing and developmental systems

And to think this kind of development could have been moving foreward as far back as 2001 IF the software market were a friendly place to assert Intellectual Property and demand it be respected... just as Microsoft demands.

So I'm putting this here so you will be able to begin absorbing the nomenclature necessary to describe and understand what many people will call web 3.0. Interoperability (the big discussion amongs VCSY longs in 2005-2006) and now portability (described in VCSY's XML enabler whitepaper and patent teachings) are only now becoming words familiar to the mainstream.

But, to those who've been discussing these issues since 2001 and before, we're now at the place dividing software maturity from "developmental" or "untested" technology to a ready for common consumption technology base - a mixture of ideas, realities, software and workers.

In my opinion, what the above posted URL describes is a shift from a technology base worrying about future reality to a realization and potential.

This difference between the traditional megalithic software community (those who know how to build operating systems valued above those who do not) and the granular componentization people (the nubbies) community is what marks the terminus for Microsoft relevance in the future web world.

It's not just about being able to engage in the common use of data as opposed to isolated islands of automation as carved out by the COM/Corba kingdom.

That common use of data is a first step. Tagging for semantic content is a first grip. Yahoo stated their value very well when they announced they would be tagging their content (that includes all emails in the Yahoo system past and present and future). There are serious privacy issues being walked up on very quickly as the technology is beginning to roll out of the factories and cottage cheese industry for a race to the money pot.

And, one would say, apparently much of this work has been going on in secret as the industry has not been speaking of these new "buzzwords" until beginning only a few months ago. Some days after Microsoft announced they were acquiring Yahoo.

Yahoo stood up some important technologies very quickly. Now, others are standing up very quickly. One has to assume they have had the ability to work this way for quite some time and they've been holding back (all of them) until a particular time when they would all begin staking their marketshare claim and begin farming.

Looks like a land rush or a gold rush.

I wonder who's holding the first nuglets?