Every time we use the phrase “data portability” here on Compiler inevitably some people misunderstand what we mean by it. And those folks are not alone it would seem, which has prompted Michael Pick of Smashcut Media to create the above video explaining what your data is and what it means to make it portable.

First there’s the data — the information you give to a website about yourself, be it a username, e-mail, who your friends are, what you like to read, listen to, watch and more.

Then there’s the portability element, the notion that you shouldn’t have to give this information to every site, the sites should be able to get it from each other or a centralized location.

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We’ve written a lot lately about data portability and content ownership and how these debates relate to the open web. The issues are complex and thorny, but there is a simple way to solve them — put all your data in the public domain.

The video above is an interview from Open Media Web with Tantek ???elik, the man behind Microformats and a host of other great ideas, in which he touts the Digg content model as a way of circumventing content ownership issues.

???elik starts off by defining the open web as consisting of two components — access to your data in both directions (reading and writing) and portability. He then goes on to argue that proprietary services, which are more concerned with content ownership, are ultimately, “like writing in sand — you might as well be building sandcastles… the sandcastles get wiped out by the next wave and that’s exactly what will happen to your content.”

Digg, on the other hand, puts all your submissions, your Digg created content, comments etc, under a Creative Commons public domain declaration, which means anyone is free to do anything they want with what you post.

That’s the ultimate in portability — it’s there for anyone to take and share and move and I really like that model because it basically says if you want to play on the open web you have to contribute your snippets — things like comments and tags and stuff — you have to contribute to the open domain.

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Google, Plaxo and Facebook announced yesterday that all three companies will be sending representatives to the DataPortability Workgroup, an organization designed to create a means of easily sharing content between social networks.

Many of the people upset by Facebook’s recent refusal to allow outside applications to scrape address book data, have hailed the announcement as proof that the open social web is inevitable. But despite the optimistic headlines surrounding Google and Facebook’s announcement, so far the move is little more than lip service and there are a variety of complex privacy issues that still need to be sorted out before any data portability scenario will be workable.

Much of the recent uproar about scraping e-mail addresses out of Facebook revolved around that fact that the tool in question moved those addresses to another company (Plaxo in this case, but the particular company is irrelevant) rather than simply a personal address book, which highlights yet another problem with data portability — many of those in favor of data portability are startups gunning for Facebook’s market share.

Not only does that make Facebook reluctant to open up, but it complicates the issue since personal backups are only one small part of the data portability equation. It’s easy to say Facebook needs to open up if you’re talking about scraping out your own data to display it on another site, but the situation becomes much less appealing when you consider that any number of companies might scrape the same data and do who knows what with it.

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