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While Web services providers are still hashing out how to securely open up their walled gardens to let their users share data with other Web sites, Google extended this notion to bloggers, an integral part of the Web 2.0 ecosystem.
Google Jan. 9 unveiled the Google Blog Converters project, an open-source effort to let bloggers shuttle their blog posts and comments between various blogging services, including Google’s own Blogger, LiveJournal, MovableType and WordPress.
The source code for Blog Converters 1.0 includes templates for hosting these conversions on Google App Engine, the company’s platform for hosting programmers’ Web applications. The effort also includes Python libraries and scripts that convert between the export formats of these blog platforms.
The project will eventually support BlogML and synchronization tools between various services that do not provide an import/export feature but do provide APIs for accessing and modifying blog contents, wrote Google’s J.J. Lueck, of Google’s Data Liberation Front, the effort supporting the Blog Converters project.
The Data Liberation Front may sound like some counter-revolutionary group planning to overthrow the Web, but in reality it’s hardly sinister.
As its name implies, the group is geared to include data across Web services; to make that data portable across other Web services; to allow users access to their own data in the cloud; and to do anything else to allow users to have fine-grained, easy access and control of their data.
The Data Liberation Front is similar in philosophy to Google’s OpenSocial API effort and the Friend Connect service, MySpaceID, Facebook Connect and other efforts to let users move data from one Web platform to the next.
Blog Converters is just one facet of a fundamental shift from siloed Web sites, which lock users in to their services, to a more boundless Web, where users can liberally migrate their data from one Web site to the next.
Efforts such as the contextual Web, where technologies augment Web browsers to make them more intelligent, also embrace this notion.
As a search and Web services leader, Google is expected to be a major player here, and Blog Converters is a step in the right direction.