Like all of us, time is in short supply so I love being able to catch up on the geek world whilst walking the dogs in the morning.

A couple of podcasts I liked so far this week…

The Scoop: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo defend social media – Interesting having a panel with some of the leaders of social networks. Obviously my ears prick up when they mentioned ninemsn dabbling in social tools (not as far as I can tell). I also agree that it’s very hard for us portals with the all things to all people mentality to properly build social networks, but try we will to some degree as UGC has been a great success for us over the past year.

Digital Planet: 24 March – Best part is listening to how Microsoft and AC Milan are working together on sports science. I knew that was the reason I never became a professional footballer. It wasn’t my ability…I just didn’t have the right technology!!

Oh, and whilst not a podcast, it was good to see my fiends at brownbook.net get featured on BBC’s Click

Yesterday I listened to a good podcast from The Scoop about the end of social networking.

Thankfully, the terrible question quickly moved on thanks to Chris Saad (after finally remembering the question) when he said Facebook will only die if it doesn’t adapt to change. The half hour conversation then moved onto more interesting topics about data portability and the social graph.

Oh, and it’s good to know someone else thinks Facebook’s greatest achievement was the mini-feed, I’ve been arguing that internally for a while.

The Scoop podcasts are really quite informative, well worth listening to while taking the dogs for a walk.

Great news from our expanding Dataportability.org group with Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook) joining the DataPortability Workgroup.

There’s been a whole lot of press about it, who can all write better than me, so here is a collection of some of the more interesting commentary that I’ve seen:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/08/this-day-will-be-remembered-facebook-google-and-plaxo-join-the-dataportability-workgroup
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/goog-fb-data.php
http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2008/01/looking_through.html

So why is significant? Firstly, these people are not just individuals but actually representing their respective companies. Secondly, two of the larger consumer service companies are embracing open standards that will allow others to innovate and interoperate with one another (unlike the wall-gardened approach currently seen by the social networks).

Yes, there are privacy concerns and a very considered approach needs to be taken before the press repurpose fact for page impressions and scare consumers about what is really been shared.

No doubt some of the other large tech companies are either actively pursuing this, or at the very least, closely monitoring the group but we’ll just enjoy this press release for now.

** On a personal note, big congratulations should go out to Chris Saad and Faraday Media. It’s quite an achievement for a small company based in Australia to get these heavy weights to sit up and take notice. Just by seeing how much he hassles me to do something shows me how much work goes on in the background to kick these things off.