* The Bay Area storms that have made headlines had very little impact here on the Peninsula. We had power all day, didn't see much wind, and the rain was not remarkable. As I write this, things outside are absolutely still.

* I added a quick static page on louisgray.com to highlight what I'm doing online, from the various services I use. Friendfeed.com does an excellent job of this, but I wanted to mirror the activity here as well. (See: louisgray.com: Friendfeed)

* Assetbar is quietly upgrading its services. I checked in on those guys this evening and was delighted to see they've gotten their new Participatory Media Platform (PMP) to work in Safari. There are a lot of "under the hood" items I've seen updated as well, as they prepare for public launch soon.

* I keep finding great new blogs and adding them to Google Reader. We're up to more than 250 individual feeds, even as I've trimmed down a number of search-related feeds that were mere filler. Some of the best recent adds include Charles Hudson, High Scalability and Andrew Chen.

* Site traffic continues to be well ahead of anything I've seen to date. To put things in perspective, just four days into January, I've already eclipsed my total visitors count from all of June 2007, and have posted three times the number from last January. Also, since posting last Friday that I'd reached the milestone of 200 RSS feed subscribers, we've already blown past 225. With any luck, we'll be showing 250 and 300 very soon.

* We also gained some prominent link-love from Mashable and Mathew Ingram overnight, with Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins calling us an Iowa caucus expert in his post Huckabama Wins, a Few Observations, and Ingram noting our comments on data ownership in his wrap-up piece, The Scoble mess and data portability.

Of course, it's on us to stay relevant and topical, so we'll try and keep focused. More thorough posts over the weekend, for sure.

You would have to have been in a cave or without Web access today to have missed Robert Scoble's one-day forced exit from Facebook, initiated after he utilized some pre-release software from Plaxo to pull down his friends' contact data. Without wanting to pile on that already fatigued story, it's an interesting salvo in what will be a heated, prolonged, battle between all the service providers, and their users, over who should gain access to what data, who owns it, and what they should be allowed to do with it.

Facebook's reasoning was that his efforts violated the company's terms of service. It's all well and good to bring your data into the site, but don't you dare try and get it out. FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit, doing some TOS sleuthing of his own, asks in response, Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook? After all, Facebook users are all giving the site access to the same type of user information deemed so valuable, and just as in violation of the terms of services as Robert's stunt was.

And Facebook isn't alone in this yearning to import contacts from other services. LinkedIn does the same thing. So does Spokeo. You can synch up your Webmail contacts, or import a .vcf card from any application, like Microsoft Outlook or Apple's Address Book. But isn't this data yours? Shouldn't it be just as easy to get the data out as it was to get it in there in the first place?

This is bound to get even more intense in the coming year and beyond. Just look at what happened when the Google Reader team got a tad over-aggressive in deciding for you how you might want your shared link items distributed. There were calls from all corners of the Web for privacy and for Google to renounce the practice. With data being so easy to generate, and so portable, for different services and devices, and with so many companies' intellectual property effectively being from user generated content, they have a vested interest in keeping you and your data in, and the ability to export out.

With that being true, it's remarkable when some companies approach the issue in a much more transparent and beneficial way. Take Assetbar, for instance. In the company's product description, they write, "Don't worry, your data is yours. You can always delete everything and even export it as a .csv or XML file!" Assetbar knows that the data you brought in and you commented on, the data you shared and the private messages you created are yours.

I believe that users aren't going to stand for companies deciding just how they should be allowed to interact with their friends and their information. They are going to demand portability. They are going to demand transparency, and they are going to demand a rapid response when things go awry. That Facebook eventually got back to Robert today and restored his account is fine, but if he wasn't one of the highest-profile bloggers on the planet, there's no way it would have happened that quickly. This time, Facebook just may have done enough to save face. But there will be a next time, and a next, and a next, unless the policies change.

On the same wavelength, Scott Karp writes about:
The Coming War Over Data On The Web

Though but a skinny weakling of a 5th grader in 1988, I remember the political horse race just about as clearly as I do that of the historic Oakland A's team who made headlines the same year. With tonight's results from the Iowa caucuses rolling in, I'm reminded of how I obsessed over the numbers back then as many are with those from today - and the 1988 race set the benchmark in my mind for how all presidential campaigns are measured.

To this day, I can tell you Alexander Haig dropped out of the Republican presidential race after getting 1% of the vote in the state. I can tell you how, on the Democratic side, Joseph Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy following charges of plagiarism. (Trust me, not even Wikipedia has such obscure knowledge!)

As the 1988 campaign evolved, I pored over the results in the morning's newspaper, and stayed up late watching the news networks project the winners of each state, or in the case of Super Tuesday, several states at once. I openly mocked Michael Dukakis at my elementary school, and attended a rally in Redding, California for the eventual Republican nominee, George Bush Sr. While my political leanings have changed dramatically, and my focus on politics has been knocked down a few pegs, behind technology and sports, despite my Political Science degree, I still love the kickoff of primary season - and am rooting for some favorites, while finding disappointment in how well others are or aren't doing.

Tonight, it looks like Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama are to be the projected winners for their prospective parties. And while that's good news for both campaigns, Iowa is hardly representative of the much-larger states whose turn will soon come to post delegates themselves. After all, in 1988, Bob Dole captured the state, and falsely looked like he was to gain momentum against the sitting vice president. It would be eight years before he captured the party's nomination, and he never made it to the White House.

In effect, despite going first, Iowa is the exception. The outlier. I don't believe Hillary Clinton will battle for 3rd in New Hampshire, and I don't believe Huckabee's folksy approach will work well very often, outside of Middle America. And while I wouldn't personally vote for Mitt Romney, I hope he eventually does better than he did tonight. But as one pundit said on the radio this evening, tonight was the first pitch in the first inning of what will be a long game. You better believe I'll be watching. Without a sitting president or vice president in the contest, it's going to be an extremely interesting few months.

It's January, and for most good Mac geeks like me, the initial post-holiday doldrums are immediately followed by anticipation of Apple's annual religious revival and trade show. Rumors typically fly fast and thick about what Steve Jobs will unveil. Live chats on multiple Web sites can slow servers and set traffic records. Spy photos are graded on their level of blurriness and new rumor sites can spring up on the strength of one good ruse.

But this year, I don't care.

You see, the story's changed. Apple used to make game-changing announcements at Macworld. Apple used to shock and surprise everybody at Macworld. And very often, I was left refreshing the Apple store online with credit card in hand.

But this year, I don't think that's going to happen.

You see, the story's changed. Apple is now making major game-changing announcements all year long. And they are no longer the underdog they once were - the little guy I could root for. Now, their market cap is three times that of Dell, and is just above that of Cisco. The big announcements, as far as I know, have already happened.

What could possibly take place to get me giddy? An iPhone update? Don't care. What about the second generation Apple TV? Don't care. The introduction of a new desktop application that runs Exchange? Maybe that would be interesting. An update to iPhoto that makes it go 20% faster. Please...

So... this year, I don't care.

The early comments about a tablet or a sub notebook or iTunes acting as a music label to sell its own songs aren't interesting. I already have a MacBook Pro. I already have an iPod Touch. I already have the first-gen Apple TV. And I already use iTunes for all my music downloads.

If they're finally getting around to movie rentals, then great. But that's in both the "obvious" and "about frickin' time" category. I won't be at Macworld this year, missing it for the 7th straight year, and while we'll be paying attention, we won't be expecting it to alter our life any.

Also See:
Macworld Expo Eve 2006
MacWorld San Francisco 2007 Eve