BuilderAU: Befriend APML -- the new markup for social profiles

Chris Saad has become something of a web 2.0 rock star of late, popping up in a range of news stories, blog posts and discussion forums, including the main story in the tech section of today's Australian Financial Review. Chris and the guys at Faraday Media have been working for some time on solving a problem that the rest of us are only just realising that we have ... that we don't have control over our personal information online. While myself and many others have been pumping info into social sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, once that information is in there it can't be easily moved or shared. A recent attempt by prominent blogger Robert Scoble to download his own data from Facebook by using a beta-release tool from Plaxo saw his account closed (and then subsequently reopened) and shot the debate about information ownership and data portability into greater prominence. You can learn a lot more about the issue and Saad's (and now the world's) solution at APML.org, and the broader data portability movement at dataportability.org. You can also check out my story on the subject at ZDNet's BuilderAU website.