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My last column discussed the brand utility supported entertainment model in which content providers and marketers work upstream to create customized complimentary experiences. One option would be to align this model with the open standard objectives of DataPortability.org. Their mission: to gather "existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable Web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go."

For brands and content creators, that means conversation would truly have to be initiated by the user. The user would own the data, and the brand content offering would have to be valuable enough to warrant an exchange. In essence, brand content would be bought with "data currency."

There are brand enthusiasts who participate in campaigns on an ongoing basis. Yet each time they return, these fans must register and sign-up for the full experience. If the brand were to embrace technologies such as OpenID, not only would it provide their fans access to cross-promotional properties around that campaign, it would also provide easy access to all future campaigns. And with future potential of data portability, people could take those experiences with them, introducing content to friends and hopefully igniting passionate new fans.

The world has changed. At least the marketing world. The era of mass marketing and advertisment as we knew it for many years has passed. Of course TV is not dead but it’s more and more superceded by the internet with all it’s channels for niche entertainment and self expression. Banner blindness and shrinking advertisement effectiveness have added their part. And so companies look out for other ways to reach potential and existing customers.

Add to that the success of the DataPortability Working Group which set policies and technical guidelines in how to create a World Wide Web in which data is more freely flowing around than ever before bringing us closer and closer to seamless networking experience and a semantic web.

This of course is only a glimpse of what might be necessary tomorrow. And the question is of course how far this tomorrow is away. Several things are of course available already or being worked on. The Google Social Graph API is there, blogging and commenting in Plone is worked on, Multimedia support is available, OpenID is as well (but maybe could be enhanced).Creating a social networking layer using e.g. plone.relations and membrane is not too complicated to implement and marking things up with microformats is also no magic.