Open Standards for Open Data Portability

I love it when technology you've been backing finally start to mesh together to form a better experience. Well in that same vein, comes dataportability.org – the open standards stack for the ubiquitous sharing and remixing of data.

All the expected standards are there including OpenID and RSS. Theres a nod towards inclusion of ubiquitous microformats like hcard and xfn which is a good idea. I would have liked to have seen FoaF and ATOM but Opml is also included which is used wide enough for it to be included. Then we have the newer kids on the block. Oauth, APML and Yadis.

I learned quite a lot about Oauth while in Berlin so can certainly give it the thumbs up now. Its basiclly like Open ID for data exchange. The best example of how it works is like how Flickr allows 3rd party applications to talk to it by authenticating them via the user first. So for example you could allow a upload tool read and write to your flickr but only let Moo.com read from them. APML i'm a large backer of from day one, when I discovered it in Particls/Touchstone (at the time). Yadis is new to me but I see its made up of things like LID and OpenID. Its bascilly a way to tie together your identies online. So you can specify openID and lightweight ID in the same file. I'm sure you could even add things like Jabber ids and other type things in the future.

Anyway, all these specs are very open and worth palying

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Taking a real holiday

I've not blogged for a while due to taking some time out to try and relax while in Berlin. This has caused a serious amount of back log in my email, calendar and general view of whats going on out there.

On top of being on holiday, my work phone (Nokia N80) is pretty much screwed now. It only works when using speaker phone. At least a while ago it still worked with my bluetooth headset but now even that doesn't work. This means if you've been trying to call me and not getting through or getting through, I've not been able to reply to you.

I finally got my bike taxed and recieved a stupid amount of real mail (mainly informational stuff) but also some stuff which is critical. All I can say is I will do them but I'm currently on a train heading up to Newcastle for BBC Innovation Labs and it only starts there. Edinburgh and Glasgow are Wednesday and Thursday. Thankfully I can enjoy the weekend – fixing my home servers.

Yeah came back to also find my home server with a Linux error about a read only file system. Almost the exact problem I had with my laptop while I was in Boston, so hopefully I can fix that myself. Unfortually this might mean dragging the thing down from the loft (trust me if you had 4 LBA hard drives in a dell beige case too it, you would moan). I've also decided that its time to upgrade to Smoothwall Express 3.0 for the firewall/router setup i have. Hopefully having a Wireless Zone will also help with the problem my flatmate has been having

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