Bloggers Hit Hard

Ok, you may have noticed I’ve been a bit slow on the draw. For the past 2 weeks I’ve been ensnared in an epic battle with a dial-up connection off the Southwest tip of Mexico. But now that I’m back with my trusty Mr. Buttons and a high-speed connection in San Francisco everything is fine. Nevertheless, it seems it hasn't been a good week for other bloggers.

OM MALIK SUFFERS HEART ATTACK

Om Malik, Business 2.0 writer and editor of GigaOm suffered a heart attack on December 28, 2007. Malik, voted one of Forbe’s 25 Top Web Celebs, posted a note to readers on his blog this morning and seems to be on the road to recovery.

FACEBOOK CUTS OF THE SCOBLEIZER
Robert Scoble, blogger/vlogger and former Microsoft evangelist was recently cut off from Facebook after running a Plaxo script to data scrape his own contacts. The internets are abuzz. Scoble has signed a petition at Dataportability.org in support of portable social data (ie. Cross-platform maneuverability).

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington argues that Plaxo flubbed the effort and now Scoble and other bloggers are paying the penalty.

Perhaps the bigger issue is the disgusting nature in which an individual’s contacts and social graph can become the proprietary information of a company like Facebook. So now that Scoble is out, who owns the data on his 4618 contacts? Facebook of course.

While Scoble did the work to make the connections, his network is wholly owned by a social networking site that refuses to open its platform to competitors. Duh. It freaking sucks, but it isn’t surprising. This is the nature of the business – one that will have to change to meet consumer demands. (That is, if the consumer doesn’t regress into a mob of bumbling idiots)

While I believe there will be better SNS alternatives with data portability in the near future, the first versions remain clunky and require a basic knowledge of programming. This continues to prevent my high school classmates from adopting new sites and I, and many others, lose out on our favorite hobby of monitoring peer weight gain via profile photos. What the world needs now is a couple hundred clever UI designers and a Daddy Warbucks to bankroll portability. The first to jump on the viable portability bandwagon should be political hopefuls and NGO's since they stand to gain the most by merging their constituencies; however, as usual, plain old geek-users are at the forefront.

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Bloggers Hit Hard

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