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First things first. DataPortability is a brand… its a kind of un-organisation (a bit like BarCamps are un-conferences); a group of people and organisations who have the same philosophy, a philosophy of the portability of data. Every member of DataPortability should push for (advocate/evangelise) portability of data to web-users, developers and organisations.

The DataPortability Project will support other projects/groups working towards data portability (at the moment this explicitly includes communities involved in OpenID, OAuth, Microformats and the Semantic Web). Some members of DataPortability are also involved with legal issues and privacy which are just as important as the portability of data. The DataPortability Project is there to support people into a Web of Data.

Portability of data, or data portability is portable data. In other words, data can be copy/pasted and/or moved from one location to another. This is dependent on accessibility.

A few months ago, we announced that we were opening the social graph and invited others to join us. An effort like that encompasses many different technology projects and all kinds of different companies; in just a few months the idea of opening up social networks has received a lot of attention. Today we're excited to share an amazing new plugin for Movable Type that allows you to aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web and we're the first to bring this sort of functionality to free and open source blogging tools.

It's worth revisiting some of the successes the openness movement has accomplished in just the past few months: Google's OpenSocial released new versions of its APIs and we hosted a wildly successful hackathon to help support the creation of new widgets for the standard. OpenID 2.0 shipped and both Google and Yahoo! are now supporting OpenID, bringing hundreds of millions of new IDs to the community. The group DataPortability.org was formed and released a video reinforcing these themes around openness. And finally, we've made good on our promise to let you show off all the services you belong to, with TypePad and Vox automatically letting you list your accounts around the web on your blogs using Microformats to link to your profiles. And as of today, the same ability is available for Movable Type.

As we explained half a year ago, we're on a mission. Like we said then, blogs change the way we communicate. Just like with TrackBack, OpenID, opening the social graph, and so much else in blogging, we're hoping that we can influence everyone else to follow our lead and move blogging forward with us. Bringing your actions around the web under your control is a fundamental next step to making all of our blogs even more powerful and expressive.