XML-Dumping and the Data Liberation Front

I am in Chamonix right now, working on my book Shaping-Network-Society. There are lots of little tidbits of insights that I have posted to this blog over the last years and so yesterday night, I had the idea of downloading all entries and then picking and choosing what would be useful for the book.

There is a function in WordPress to download all blog-entries as .pdfs. Which I did, but when starting to copy-paste, I was confronted with lots of annoying formatting problems. So I decided to do an xml-dump, hoping it would be easier to parse through hundreds of pages in a word processor. This is what I got:

...<guid isPermaLink="false">http://importer9.wordpress.com
/2006/08/04/governance-in-network-society/</guid>
[CDATA[On Monday, I was in Mexico City, invited by
Lourdes (the president of CIAPEM)

Now of course, I know that technically, there are many things I could do with the xml-file. But the questions that the Google Data Liberation Front asks of any online service are pertinent in today’s network society.

  1. Can I get my data out at all?
  2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
  3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

Think about if you ever would want to leave Facebook, Picassa, Twitter, Gmail, or Xing, but take your data with you. These questions are fundamental to our network societies and clearly express the political tension between networks as choice communities and the path dependency inherent in the participation in networks.

These issues are much more important to society in the 21st Century than the silly debate on if Journalism will survive the internet. Should we be worried that Google seems to be one of the few political theorists of network society? Will we refer to them as the distributed/crowd-sourced Thomas Hobbes of their time in 300 years? Or is this taken directly out of Monthy Python’s Life of Brian?

About Philipp

Philipp Müller works in the IT industry and is academic dean of the SMBS. Author of "Machiavelli.net". Proud father of three amazing children. The views expressed in this blog are his own.

09. October 2009 by Philipp
Categories: Blog | 2 comments

Comments (2)

  1. lmireles@gmail.com'
    Luis says October 13, 2009 at 7:43 am

    …completely agree with you on the relevance of this issue…

    …as a user, i had never structured the thought out, but i did feel impotence when not long ago i realized that if a particular networking/microblogging/fotosharing site i've used the last 3 years would disapear i didn`t have a back up for my posts, which is esentially content i've created and that unless i make the effort to document it, i'd loose in any such event…

    …are there industry standard proposals out there?

  2. pmontes@princeton.edu'
    paulamontes says January 6, 2010 at 11:02 pm

    Hi Phillipp!!! I thought this might interest you and all of the followers of this page…

    Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton http://wws.princeton.edu/news/Felten_Schultze/

    Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs | 'Civic technologies' developed at Princeton
    Edward Felten and Stephen Schultze use computers as flashlights. The Princeton computer scientists recently oversaw the launch of two Web-based technologies to illuminate the workings of government by …

    Cheers from your former Colombian student!
    Paula