Introduction and Motivation

[wmerydith]

--Introduction--

I'm the CTO for a small startup and we've just released an Alpha of a
what we're calling a media marketplace. I used to be a developer at
*largest media company in the world*, where I was an early voice for
micro formats - and was an early political casualty for suggesting
that we provide an easy means for competitors to take our user's
data. They never realized what was wrong with the "take our user's
data" part of that statement ;)

I've got a great team of developers and we've been having a lot of
discussions about the semantic web, sharing data and building an open
platform that allows us to capitalize on the larger tool set as well
as give our users control over their data.

We're two more months from beta and we want to ensure that we're still
on the path to actually implementing an "open" architecture and not
just being part of the new buzzword.

We've implemented OpenID, hCalendar and rel-tag.

--Motivation--

Our motivation for joining the Data Portability action group is to
share our challenge in implementing more microformats that specific to
the data our site will work with, and implement that format correctly
so that it has a chance of being useful.

We work closely with large and small music labels who are challenged
with running so many band sites, and needing to share users among
those sites as well as 3rd party networks (like us). We've been
evangelizing OpenID in every meeting and they are starting to hear the
message. When they implement is another story ;)

We're a small team of 7 here in Fairfield Iowa and we'd like be a
part of the conversation and implementation, which I believe are both
requirements for being a successful evangelist of data portability.

--Next Step--

We need to implement a language (microformat) for describing our music
and film centric data. So my first question is, is anyone else doing
this or already done this before we attempt to unnessecarily
duplicate. We're interested in extending, adopting or creating based
on where things are right now.

[Brady BD]

Will,

Let me be the first to say welcome to the DataPortability Project.
The Implementation Action Group is a bit quiet as of late - much of
the current conversation is occurring over in the Technical Group.
Glad you are participating, and please join in on the conversation,

Brady