Anti-Microsoft takeover weapon? Genuine data portability at Yahoo? Friendly note from Yahoo social media guru offers a little hope for Yahoo 360 bloggers
People like Beth Wellington, the Virginia blogger worried about the fate of the hundreds of posts she made to the Yahoo 360 service, now winding down, will be glad to learn I’ve finally heard from Yahoo.
Marc Davis, the company’s social media guru, sent me a short, friendly note today of the “How can I help you?” variety. I’ve responded that Yahoo should provide the 360 bloggers with the right tools to move their posts elsewhere, as had been promised earlier. And I also hope that that Yahoo will back, and implement the recommendation of, DataPortability.org. I’ll be optimistic and expect that Marc will agree with me. Ideally he’ll then enjoy support from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and others—which, come to think of it, would help show that Yahoo cares about its community members more than Microsoft would if the former ended up in the latter’s maw. Yahoo’s directors could then use such facts in the press and court in the battle to keep their company from sliding down Bill Gates’ gullet.
Book angles
Yes, in data portability, there are some book angles here. Big publishers like HarperCollins are urging authors to blog on corporate sites and create other content there to promote books. But over the long run, just who will preserve the prose and other content, including maybe even multimedia? Will authors be able to pick up the content for their use elsewhere? And what happens in the era of interactive e-books when writers might even establish blogs within books hosted on publishers’ servers (one more reason for the IDPF to do .epub annotations standards)?
In fact, why limit the issue to writers? Shouldn’t everyone be able to take his or her words to any host, within the bounds of contractual limits? That will require technical standards, the core of the DataPortability.org. What’s more, it wants to do an “Intel Inside”-style campaign to brand the mix of standards needed to assure true portability.
Would be good for Yahoo, too
People like Beth wouldn’t be the only beneficiaries of such an approach. Companies such as Yahoo could use data portability as a way to draw more Netfolks to its social sites and encourage them to make more posts. When you truly own your data, moreover, you just might spend more time on your writing, photography, music or other content.
For blogs, items preserved should at least include—as I’ve noted before—”texts, image and sound files, layouts within posts, blogrolls, internal and external links, tags, and, of course, visitor comments.”
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