Enhancing options for data portability is awesome for at least two reasons. First, I can see how storing one’s data “in the cloud” could be a bit disconcerting – what happens if a particular product or service goes under and takes your data with it? Being able to move your data from service to service, or store it locally, ensures that you’ll always be able to access it.

Second, it enables users to choose the service that best meets their needs. Someday, a Webmail service might come out that blows the pants off of Gmail. Should I be forced to use Gmail simply because that’s where all of my data (like contacts and archived mail) is stored?

In a way, enabling people to easily take their data to a competitor shows how confident Google is in their products. They’re betting that giving users the option to easily take their data wherever they want will attract more users than they’ll lose through people doing just that. I think their confidence will be rewarded.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

Now I’m no big city lawyer, but it seems to me that while your tweets remain your intellectual property, Twitter could still, given the terms of the TOS, publish a book of the greatest tweets and profit from it without reimbursing users. However, given the controversy over Facebook’s revised TOS earlier this year, Twitter users and those who value privacy should be able to take comfort in the fact that if they delete their account, Twitter won’t own the deleted tweets.

“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.

Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”

Sure, teenagers and college students made MySpace and Facebook what they are today, but young people also have a ton of time on their hands to customize profiles, add “about me” information, browse profiles, and so on. Older folks usually have responsibilities like careers and kids, and so they don’t (or can’t) devote the same amount of attention to keeping updated.

The great thing about Twitter, however, is that it doesn’t require much of a learning curve or time commitment to participate. Even better, it’s been built to work on mobile devices, so users can check tweets and update on the go. Given this dynamic, it’s no surprise Twitter has been embraced by older users, who are able to get a lot out of a service they don’t have to put a lot into.

When you’re new to the social media scene, the number of sites you need to monitor may feel overwhelming. Fortunately, Mashable has a great post about free tools that will have anyone up and running with online reputation monitoring on blogs, blog comments, Twitter, message boards, and more. Definitely worth a look!

Twitter has been pretty stable lately, and the Fail Whale hasn’t made an appearance for me for what seems like at least a month. Even though the service has made great strides recently, and has attracted a lot of mainstream attention from news outlets such as CNN, @biz and @ev are concerned with the service’s “sustainability,” which is understandable. Although when I use ad-supported Twitter programs like Twitterrific for the iPhone, it makes me think that Twitter could include in-feed ads, charge for premium accounts (maybe with a raised follow limit?) or throw banner ads up without upsetting the user base.

Still, I appreciate that Twitter is devoted to getting its act together before figuring out how to make money. But with swelling numbers of users and investors breathing down their necks, how long can they afford to do so?

“The Quietus kept our article up the longest and, as no non-disclosure agreement had been signed, [was] not prepared to remove it merely due to the demands of Metallica’s management,” Turner continued. “We only eventually removed the article earlier today to protect the professional interests of the writer concerned (the piece was written anonymously).”

Metallica has a long history of alienating their biggest fans, and clearly fears digital media, but this feels clumsy and ham-fisted even for them. If the album mix wasn’t final, they shouldn’t have invited writers to listen to it and then act shocked when they, you know, wrote about it.

Executives would grumble. After all, good reporting costs money. The infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of news, be it print, radio or television, is extremely expensive – It’ll be impossible to compete when everyone is a reporter and can instantly broadcast or publish around the world. Plus, there’s only so much ad money to go around – if advertisers flock to the little guy, that’s fewer ad dollars for the big companies! Not to mention the loss of revenue that comes in from the “for sale” and “want” ads!

The time traveler, if he were savvy, would agree, but with a few caveats. While it’s true that things will change a great deal in the next quarter-decade, he’d say, you’re missing the big picture. Wouldn’t you want your content distributed instantly and inexpensively, all over the world? (I can travel to Europe and still read live updates of baseball games at the Web page of my hometown newspaper.) Despite the new influx of opinion leaders and “new” media personalities, don’t people still need and crave local news? (All news is local news, after all.) Won’t new means of content distribution provide new ways to deliver advertising? (There’s a reason Google wants in on the mobile phone market, and it’s not to sell handsets.)

Finally, don’t you realize that quality reporting will always cost time and money, something usually out of the reach of everyone but news organizations that can afford it? (People can only have an opinion about the news if there’s news to opine on.)

After leaving executives with those thoughts, when the time traveler returned to the present day, would anything have changed? Could the big media companies have figured out how to leverage all of these opportunities, or would we continue to hear stories about major media outlets, from those with national reach to those in major local markets laying off personalities because of the rise of the Internet and social media?

I wonder sometimes.

I was glad to hear a new site called My Damn Channel, founded by real, live Hollywood filmmakers and performers, will bring high-quality video content to the Web. Better yet, they’ve signed a distribution deal with YouTube to syndicate their content, which is such a no-brainer I can’t believe other companies haven’t followed suit.

I have been hearing more and more about similar syndication deals, however, and if technologies such as Joost are well received, it may encourage other, more traditional content providers to make their programs available across more platforms. For many of these platforms it means giving up a bit of control, which is scary. However, the music industry has once again shown everyone the writing on the wall, and giving up that control just might be what it takes to grow and thrive in a “three screen” world.

In the 90′s it seemed like everyone had a personal home page with pictures, interests and links to other pages they liked. The social network has largely replaced the home page, and many people maintain blogs and accounts with any of the countless Web 2.0 services that compete for our attention.

I would really like to figure out how to include all of this information on one page, with each aspect featuring its own RSS feed. Facebook has come the closest to this idea since it opened up its API, but users there are still stuck, in many ways, within a walled garden. Web widgets are also progressing in this direction, but don’t offer the essential ability to customize.

Looks like I have some research to do.

New regulations require soldiers to clear content of blogs and e-mails with a superior officer, Wired said. The directive, issued April 19, could lead to the end of military blogs — known within the military culture as ‘miliblogs’ — observers told Wired.

Military officials have wrestled for years with striking a balance between the need for discretion in wartime and the benefits of allowing troops in the field to connect personally with the public, the magazine said — especially since the troops are often seen as among the most effective advocates for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I understand that some of the information coming out of the war is extremely sensitive, and the military needs to ensure confidential information isn’t accidentally distributed. In the real world, though, the majority of superior officers will simply not have the time to go through each and every blog post for approval, and blogging will shrivel up. It’s a shame, because most milbloggers strongly believe in their mission and are able to articulate their hopes and successes. They’re a rare source of positive PR in the war.

I would have really liked to have seen the military adopt a blogging policy similar to some large companies (such as IBM) which outlines what you can and cannot say, what information is confidential, and so on, and possibly require milbloggers to simply alert their superior officers to their blog’s presence. They would have the best of both worlds in terms of accountability and freedom, and I’d still be able to look forward to stories from the front lines.