DataPortability is an effort by a group of volunteers and Internet application vendors to promote the capability to control, share, and move data from one system to another. DataPortability is the idea that users should be able to move, share, and control their identity, photos, videos and all other forms of personal data.

The project aims to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols to enable end-to-end data portability between online tools, vendors, and services.

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A few initiatives like this have been started, but the most important factor for success is to see how social networks adapt to a companie's standard. Currently, I see DataPortability forging ahead with adaption from facebook, twitter, netvibes, and linedIn. I believe all the "competitors" for this "portability" market are collaborating and are ultimately looking for the greater good of online practices, ethics and standards.

Here is a list of similar efforts that are trying to unify a standard:

OpenID

"A free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet."

OAuth

"An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications."

Microformats

"Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns."

Xmpp

"Xmpp is an open XML technology for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, media session management, shared editing, whiteboarding, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized XML routing."

A couple of days ago I asked you to imagine a world in which news media could possibly be neutral. The problem is...I don't actually think that news media can ever be neutral. With humans running the show a natural bias is always assumed, if computers ran the show their analysis of humans would be skewed due to the unpredictable nature of people. I do feel however that changes in the Internet over the past few years have altered the way we get our news in a really interesting way, possibly moving the news we consume towards a less biased place.

The introduction of RSS feeds, APIs, vlogging, blogging, and other social media sites have dramatically altered the way in which many people consume informational/news content. Audiences are no longer tethered to a piece of paper or television at a certain time to receive the news for that day. They don't have to hope that the news will cover the topic that is important to them, nor do they have to remain bound to a news source they don't like simply because that's all that is available. Consuming news content doesn't have to be a one-way passive activity anymore.

The audience can now choose where they get their news from, what their news is about and when they receive the news. More importantly the user can compare the same story from multiple sources to check accuracy, comment on stories, read expert (and not so expert) analysis of a situation, search the Internet for raw facts regarding what they have read and if they feel inclined...they could even add their own opinion, analysis or knowledge to the mix.

With the Internet at our finger tips we have a broader base of news and information to choose from. By diversifying the information channels we consume, we are able to see multiple view points, therefore giving us a more vast set of information from which we can formulate our own opinions (or biases). So while this method of consuming the news does not eradicate biases from individual news outlets it does collectively give the audience a more neutral experience with the news. By giving the audience a set of stories from multiple outlets about the same news event the audience can draw their own conclusions rather than just believe what one news story from a single outlet has told them.

In many ways the audience has gained some controls over what is being fed to them, what I wonder now is what the danger of that control really is.

I started to consider the world we live in today. News media is a primary resource for getting information about events that haven't quite been cataloged in our history books yet. It is our way of knowing what is going on around the world. I would also argue that the news media, by its very nature is tragically flawed. There is no hope of true neutrality in news media as it stands right now. The way our news is curated via omission prevents news media as a whole from every being truly non-bias. I wondered what it might take to create a neutral news media...

Imagine a world where cameras and microphones are everywhere, every angle is watched and listened to. In that world there is a massive database of faces and voices cataloged for easy reference. Now imagine that there are no reporters, what these cameras and microphones are capturing is the news. The system that these cameras hook into would run checks with the databases of people for an accurate account of who was there, the system would understand what was said. The system would then edit this information into a comprehensive news cast that would be available for all of the world's citizens to view.

When the news media is void of human editing does the news then become neutral? How does the addition of technology into the sphere of news media effect the neutrality of our news?