Google Creates Open-Source App Engine Project for Exporting Blog Content
By: Clint Boulton
2009-01-12
Article Rating: / 4
Google unveils the open-source Blog Converters project for federating the exchange of data between blogging platforms, including Blogger, MoveableType, WordPress and LiveJournal. 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.
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.
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