As i finished up my coffee Saturday morning before heading to the BART station to pick a fellow 'she geek' up to head down to day two of She's Geeky, a quick look at Techmeme reminded me of some of the important issues we had discussed the day before at the session about 'Making Information Accessible'.

That morning's two stories that caught my attention, was one on Google going 'bonkers' earlier that morning with malware messages on all the results and Ma.gnolia a social bookmarking site suffering major data loss and basically forcing them to shut down access to the site. [it is now Monday at 9:30PST and the site is still down with no message when you land on their pages which is disturbing. the last message is on their twitter account @magnolia]

In that session on friday we discussed structuring data for findability and reuse but we also went on a tangent about where the data is stored, who has access, who owns it, who can move the data etc.

This is one of the reasons that i got involved with the DataPortability Project early on and currently server on the Steering Committee as chairperson along with other roles. The project is addressing the issue of user data with the vision that "data portability enables a borderless experience, where people can move easily between network services, reusing data they provide while controlling their privacy and respecting the privacy of others". Issues of ownership, security and access to your user data are an important part of ensuring data portability for users.

So over the last few days, i have been thinking, would i pay for a service that took all my data from these various site i am adding value to and kept it secure, aggregrated and always accessible with 'one' click? (content created on services like Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, and on and on etc.) Yes i would. Stowe Boyd describes such as service at the end of his post on the subject.

and i just did a backup of my delicious tags- you never know...and fingers crossed for the mag.nolia team and users (i am one of their users but have over the last year mostly used delicious).

Image|Flickr|svenwerk

I had a colleague ask me today what i thought were the latest trends in consumer generated media- what "i thought was exciting and gaining traction". My thoughts are below- my definition of media is obviously not just text based media but content that is created through multiple formats that represents an idea, an opinion, an endorsement, a conversation etc.

What have i missed (not specific service providers but additional categories)? Please add to comments. Thanks!

In no particular order:

• Twitter and other microblogging platforms
• Social Networks- content created through things like Facebook feeds
• User generated Metadata (Library of Congress Flickr project, increase in Microformat adoption, FOAF, enablers like Reuters Calais project etc.)
• Visualization – taking data and making visual engaging media–Swivel , ManyEyes, Gapminder
• Portable content- content that consists of friends lists, attention filters etc. see dataportability.org
• Video Video Video – but not just uploading/sharing video- Services like Seesmic that enable conversations and EyeJot- new communication to replace emails etc.
• Self publishing, Lulu.com, Blurb.com etc.
  
• User Generate product creation, Zazzle, Cafepress,- all the rage is to create your own merchandise – smart vendors are jumping on board see the partnerships that folks like Zazzle have with Disney,Lucas etc.
• Self publishing tools for creating business marketing, e-learning material etc. Flypaper, slideshare,
• Online Digital Picture tools- Picnik, Scrapblog
• Data that creates data- mashups that are taking user generated content and generating content from that data for the user on the fly. Tools like MyBlogLog’s enablement of Blog Juice
  
• Mobile content- be it video, pictures or good old text

What else?

While many are arguing that The Wall Street Journal didn't get the Blogging history article correct, i have been busy playing around with the new article recommendations feature that is now available on WSJ.com.

WSJ has partnered with Loomia a recommendations engine whose hope for media companies is to guide users to content on their site that they might never have seen otherwise. I think it is a very useful feature and have always been a fan of content produced by other readers actions- what i call User Generated Data- such as most e-mailed, most read, most traded (stocks), most blogged etc.. WSJ also recently released features using Sphere to present related articles and blogs.

It is great to see WSJ.com implement these types of tools because as with most consumer focused new media tools, my clients in the enterprise space are also starting to talk about providing similar functionality in regards to creating a 'wisdom of crowds' type of sharing around news content.

Read the What's This description in the screen shot i provide to understand a bit about how the recommendation's engine works.

Loomia also comes with clickstream monitoring which is obviously of use above and beyond proactively serving up content- for example it can continue to provide metrics and user behaviors around the type of content readers like and authors should be writing.

What are we going to see on WSJ.com next- a MyBlogLog widget?

Monday's edition will also have a Twitter article. I am not sure if this WSJ twitter channel belongs to WSJ.com but is doesn't seem to be updating, Marketwatch another Dow Jones property has a twitter channel but it doesn't have that many followers (i know that one is 'owned' by Marketwatch). I took a look at other twitter URLs like twitter.com/bbc, twitter.com/reuters, twitter.com/nyt (which belongs to Dave Weiner) etc. and they all have very few followers as well. I personally like my Marketwatch twitter alerts.