Where Did I Put My Data?

With the death of micro-blogging service Pownce and recent troubles with GMail, not to mention the precarious state of Yahoo! and--by association--Delicious and Flickr, you can't help but begin to worry about entrusting your data to these companies. It's time to ask... are they really impervious to technical difficulties and financial realities?

This discussion will draw a line in the sand in the battle for your data. Tim O'Reilly famously said that data is the new 'Intel inside' and he was right for a time. However, now is the time to take back your data! Let's use this discussion to develop a manifesto that outlines the re-democratization of an Internet, which has otherwise become a fertile ground for abuse by seemingly benign corporate entities.

Dave Johnson

Dave is a software developer/tech writer/scientist living and working in Vancouver. He's the co-founder of Nitobi, a Vancouver based software consulting company. He has degrees from the University of British Columbia (BASc Electrical Engineering) and Imperial College London (PhD Experimental Solid State Physics).

While planning on using his education one day, these days he has a penchant towards dynamic languages like JavaScript, Ruby and Scala as well as related MVC frameworks like CompleteMVC (work in progress), Rails and Merb.

Dave contributes to several different open source projects, most notably CompleteUI, which is an Ajax/JavaScript component framework, and PhoneGap, which is a framework that exposes mobile phone APIs to web pages. He has co-authored the book Enterprise Ajax, on that very subject, published by Prentice Hall.