BlogRovr lets you identify what blogs you read, then notifies you when any URL you visit has been linked to by one of those blogs. That technology will remain free but will now be put to use for PR monitoring and advertising sales by BuzzLogic.

Before you sell my data, even in anonymized aggregate, to a PR and ad sales firm - should I be able to export my clickstream and the subsequent analysis? Is that my data? Is it BlogRovr's to sell without concern for my access to it? This announcement brings up a number of interesting questions about Data Portability.

Below, a screenshot from BuzzLogic's dashboard.

If I Use Your Tool and You Use My Data - Who's Property is the End Product?

Presumably Blogrovr is or is going to track user clickstreams (browsing history). That, combined with the overlap with subscribed blogs, will be useful in determining blogger influence and a price point for rapid ad placement.

This certainly isn't the entirety of what BuzzLogic has acquired - BlogRovr execs are being given extensive responsibility over BuzzLogic technolgies as a whole. The minds behind the browser plug-in may be as valuable as the data it churns out, but the data is important to discuss.

On one hand, the company used its proprietary technology to capture this data in a way that users are practically incapable of capturing themselves - at least the overlap with all subscribed blogs. On the other hand, BlogRovr minus their 180k users isn't good for much of anything.

I asked Chris Saad, Chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, what his take on this question was. "If the data was generated for or by your behavior then you co-created it," he said, "therefore u should have co-ownership of it at least." What does that mean, practically? As a thought exercise, should BlogRovr split its acquisition price somehow with it's users? "No," Saad said, "BlogRovr gets to keep the money and the aggregate derived data - but the user should be able to export their own data as well, and perhaps even request their account to be deleted."

That sounds reasonable to me, but that's not what's being made available. Users are allowed to export their OPML file of subscribed feeds - but all other data is unavailable.

Is Clickstream Data a User's Own Responsibility?

Pundit Steve Gillmor has been arguing lately on the Gillmor Gang (now hosted by TechCrunch - thanks Mike!) that data portability advocates are wrong to demand that services capturing their clickstream data turn that data over to users. He, and if he's alone he's probably all the more right, argues that user clickstream data is a user's responsibility to capture if it's so darned important. We don't need anyone to give it to us - we already have access to it.

While that may be technically true of browsing history, it is much less true of the subsequent analysis of history cross referenced with blog subscriptions. In theory though, is that data more difficult to access for a typical user than the clickstream is? Neither is particularly accessible without some technology, but if a company builds that technology do they then own its fruit?

Saad again says, "if BlogRovr is capturing it, then they should share it. It's user generated content." I'm not sure it's quite that simple, but it might be.

It seems to me that there aren't clear answers around any of this. Some people and companies are engaging with these questions, but BlogRovr's Marc A. Meyer admits that his company simply hasn't been one of them. That's a refreshingly honest answer, and better than I got from Meyer's new PR/ad network bosses - but so what? The company was clearly blazing a trail in terms of using users' data - do they not have a responsibility to explore the other half of the equation - user access to that data?

Maybe This Isn't About User Rights

It's also possible that Data Portability is best advocated not from a position of right and wrong, of user rights, but instead as a matter of competitive advantage. If BlogRovr had a viable competitor that differentiated itself by offering users access to their data throughout the process - perhaps that competitor could emerge victorious. Would a PR/ad network have bought such a company, though, if it offered to hand over this valuable user data? Would enough users have cared to make such differentiation meaningful as a competitive advantage?

There are no end of questions that still need answers in regards to data portability. For now, BlogRovr and BuzzLogic deserve congratulations at least for recognizing the value of user data in the blogosphere. How should the rest of us feel about the news, though?

Attention data, and its cousin sales data, is very important for companies because it allows them to personalize services to specific users. By looking at your past purchases, Amazon can make recommendations about new products you might like. By looking at what you've listened to, Last.fm and make recommendations about new musicians you might enjoy. Netflix can do the same with movie rentals, Facebook can do it with advertisements, Digg will soon do it with news, etc. But the question is: who owns that data?

"Intuitively, the information belongs to the consumer, but when we look into the details, things become less clear. We explicitly choose to use Amazon, to click and to buy things there," wrote Alex Iskold in August. "Everything we do is a two way street, since Amazon provides a service and we transact with it, it seems that they should have a right to the data as well."

Even today, on this blog, we made a call for a company to open data to users. Sarah Perez called out Facebook for their timid foray into lifestreaming that doesn't allow users to export their data out of the service. And she's right, of course. Facebook's new mini-feed service would be ten times more powerful and useful to users if it didn't just aggregate outside and on site data (which Facebook will undoubtedly mine for ad targeting purposes), but also let users take it back out.

However, does Facebook have an obligation to allow the portability of all user data on the site? Even if they didn't support data portability, whose data is it? Users generated it, but voluntarily (i.e., no one forces you to put any information on Facebook), so do those users have a right to demand it back?

Real World Data Portability

But even while the debate rages online about whether sites should be required to give users access to their data, there is a whole wealth of attention data that we're creating offline as well. Should we have access to that, too? What about every movie we've rented from Blockbuster? Every book we've checked out of the library? Our purchasing habits at Costco? How often and where we fill up our gas tanks? Even where our GPS systems take us or from where we're making cellular phone calls, to whom, and for how long are potentially trackable pieces of data.

Every time I make a purchase at my local CVS pharmacy, I swipe a discount card. I do it because I get coupons back for things I purchase, and CVS can tailor those coupons to me because it knows my purchasing habits. Should I be able to have access to that sales data as well? Should CVS let me bring my sales history to Walgreens and see what coupons Walgreens gives me? Of course, that option doesn't exist right now at either CVS or Walgreens -- but increasingly it does exist online, because we asked for it. So why not offline?

There is a ton of offline attention and sales data out there. If we're demanding access to that information online, shouldn't we ask for it offline as well?

Conclusion

The answer, in my opinion, is yes: we should be asking for it. But companies should be under no obligation to part with it -- offline or online. It is certainly a great bonus when a company gives you comprehensive access to your attention data in an easily exportable format. That has a lot of advantages for the consumer, and is probably a good idea long term for many companies as well. But our dealings with the services that collect this information are generally opt in. That is, if we don't want them collecting our data, we should simply walk away.

What do you think? Does real world data portability have any merit? Do you know of any "offline" companies that offer customers access to that sort of information already?

It's applications like this that make me love my job reviewing what's new on the web.

I don't know why more sites don't take some stab at accepting inbound APML and offering personalization of content, but I sure am glad to see this site doing so. The APML page on Idiomag could use some explanation and I don't see that it's linked to elsewhere on the site - but there's not a whole lot of demand yet either. What's important is that this service is in the game.

The degree of personalization is really impressive. The video below demonstrates how Idiomag pulls in syndicated content from all over the web and assembles it seamlessly. The automated integration of text and media is particularly striking.

Just like Pandora or Last.fm, your recommendations get increasingly fine tuned by voting for each "article" you like or dislike. My APML file doesn't have much music in it but I plugged my Pandora profile into Idiomag and am already discovering some cool new music. It's an awesome product that is best experienced by trying it out.

The biggest problem with the service is probably its limited content. It's only useful for some musical genres and is far from unlimited in what it offers even in those. For a quick, personalized, daily read with some videos and videos, though, I'm really impressed.

Check out this video below to see how it works.