Taking a quick break from the daily chores to highlight this fairly big news announcement coming out of the Dataportability Workgroup that Google, Facebook and Plaxo have joined the workgroup today. I am an active member of the DP Workgroup** so congrats to all involved!

The DataPortability Workgroup is, among other things, actively working to create the 'DataPortability Reference Design' to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability.

Yeah so what does that mean for you? Basically that users will be able to access their social data eventually across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement these designs into their systems and importantly companies who are implementing services will have standards to adopt to ensure maximum accountability and usability.

The technologies that the DataPortability workgroup are advocating are not necessarily "new" or propriety- they include existing open standards that you might have already heard of like RDF, RSS, OpenID, Microformats and others. The objective is to create a stack of services that support dataportabilty.

Techcrunch coverage here and ReadWriteWeb's coverage. Why is this a big deal?

The DP Workgroup over the last few months have been implementing and supporting some great initiatives just take a look at the conversations over at the Dataportability Google Group so why will the addition of Google, Facebook, Plaxo and hopefully others be a big deal? Well, who are the biggest players that hold most of your data online? Google is probably the biggest and Facebook, and Plaxo are just some of the others biggies. This is great news.


**NOTE**I have been a Dataportability Workgroup member from the beginning thanks to my involvement with APML and Chris Saad's (the DP Workgroup's chair and Particls CEO) excellent support and inclusion. Although i work for Dow Jones, being a member of the DP Workgroup does not imply that Dow Jones itself is currently supporting the Workgroup (but we are active W3C members and supporters of standards like RDF). I understand that the new members from Google, Facebook and Plaxo however are representing their companies.

Earlier today i was alerted via Twitter that today was Blue Beanie Day, a self organized effort to show support for web standards and accessibility when Standardistas (people who support web standards) where encouraged to wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

It seems that the event is in honor of Jeffrey Zeldman’s photo on the cover of his book, ”Designing with Web Standards”. Being a fan of online flash mobs and certainly a supporter of web standards i of course joined in at my earliest convenience.

The call to action however is a timely one and part of another 'movement' that is going on around 'Standardized Data Portability' that i am involved in via the dataportability.org group. The concept behind the call for a standard way to port ones' data is that "As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors". Our data should be ours to share between services that we chose to share the data with and the group advocates an open standards stack for sharing and remixing of data.


On Read/WriteWeb today, Marshall Kirkpatrick acknowledging Blue Beannie day and providing his thoughts on standards also made mention of the efforts of dataportability.org . And over the last few weeks they are others beyond the current contributors, (Chris Saad, Ashley Angell, Paul Jones, Chris Messina,Ben Metcalfe, Daniela Barbosa (that of course would be me) , Phill Morle, Ian Forrester, Shashank Tripathi, Kristopher Tate, Paul Keen, Brian Suda,Emily Chang, Danny Ayers) who are also getting on board to call for the utilization of existing formats that have been identified as part of the standards stack that can and should be used together to create true open social applications.