Ross Dawson has published a list of the top 60 web apps in Australia in the BRW this week. At number 5, our very own Engagd.com - the engine that powers Attention Profiling for the web at large as well as Particls version 2.

This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the development team. A huge thanks to Ashley Angell, Paul Jones and Jon Cianciullo who have been working tirelessly to manage, build and polish the Engagd platform.

Particls itself came in at 21. That will change of course once we launch the new version!

Thanks to Ross for his hard work compiling the list and including us.

Ashley went to Sydney to demo Engagd at the celebration party. By all accounts it was a big success. Somehow he made a developer platform interesting for a non-technical audience. Good work my friend!

There are only a limited number of start-up founders in the world, even less who sets his or her mind to change the very fabric of the internet. Chris is one of them.

When Chris and I founded Faraday Media, it was of extreme importance that just being another startup was not enough. We had to do something meaningful. Something significant. Not happy with fame or glory, we wanted to grow as people - giving back to a medium which had fed us for long time. To take the internet to a new place, just like Google had done nearly a decade ago. Its been a long road for Faraday, and while it hasn’t always been easy, Chris’ drive and aspiration has bought us to new and extraordinary heights, time after time after time; often at great personal sacrifice. I could never ask for a better CEO, or friend.

It’s no secret that Chris and I are the best of friends and it makes me very happy, to congratulate him on being selected as one of the 30Under30’s for Anthill, the leading entrepreneurial magazine in Australia.

From the website:

At 26, Chris Saad is one of Australia’s most impressive young web entrepreneurs. His theory and practice around web standards - specifically ‘DataPortability’ and ‘Attention Management’ - have gained significant traction and are set to have a profound impact on the evolution of media in the digital age. Saad has co-founded several web-related companies and organisations, most prominently Faraday Media in 2006, of which he is CEO. Faraday Media is developing Particls, a technology that learns user habit and taste and delivers relevant information to them via news crawler, SMS, email, flash visualisations, etc. He also co-founded the Media 2.0 Workgroup with 14 industry ‘commentators, agitators and innovators’. There’s no shortage of ideas or energy in this digitally-minded entrepreneur. One to watch in the years to come.

Make sure you click through to the Article, subscribe to the mag and read the other 29 profiles!

This is recognition to a man whom has dedicated and sacrificed so much for the greater good, a true philanthropist. Well done Chris, you are definitely deserving of this prestigious award and will no doubt be one of many in the years to come.

Time to continue the conversation about DataPortability… this time using video.

We want to hear your thoughts about DataPortability recorded as a short video. We hope to share these videos individually as well as compile them into a single video to help the community understand expectations, goals and themes that are emerging in the discussion.

Here are the questions we’d like you to answer.

• What does DataPortability mean to you?

• How do you imagine DataPortability might change the way you use the web?
• How would you explain the value of DataPortability to Vendors - those that store the data.
• How would you explain the value of DataPortability to Users - those that create and own the data.
• Ideally, what would you like to see from the DataPortability Project in the next 12 months? 24 months?
• What else would you like to say? Make up a question and answer it!
• Finally, if you agree with the sentiment, please say “My name is [your name] and I want Data Portability” at the end of your video.

If you can, please try to limit the video to a maximum of 5 minutes.

We’d like to compile these for February 20th. Please make sure you get your video in before then!

To submit the video, post it to one of the video sharing sites and tag it ‘DataPortabilityAndMe’

I look forward to seeing what the community has to say.

Special thanks to Daniela Barbosa, Chris Messina and the Evangelism Action Group for this idea!

We are proud to announce the inclusion of Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook) to the DataPortability Workgroup.

Plaxo, Google and Facebook together represent the key players in the competing approaches to Social Networking platforms and Data Portability.

Their joint support of the DataPortability initiative presents a new opportunity for the next generation of software - particularly in the fields of social software, user rights and interoperability.

The DataPortability Workgroup is, among other things, actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability.

This means users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

We look forward to their contribution to the conversation.

More about the DataPortability initiative:

Our Philosophy: As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

Our Mission: To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. And, to promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

Besides these new additions, the WorkGroup includes, among others, Chris Saad (Faraday Media), Stephen Kelly (Peepel), Ben Metcalfe (Consultant to Seesmic and Myspace), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency, Microformats), Daniela Barbosa (Dow Jones), Phil Morle, Ian Forrester (BBC), Kristopher Tate (Zooomr), Paul Keen (NineMSN), Brian Suda, Emily Chang (eHub), Danny Ayers (Talis), Robyn Tippins (Yahoo!), Robert Scoble (PodTech).

For more information:

Please visit the DataPortability site.

Read/Write Web Coverage

Techcrunch Coverage

As many of you know, Faraday Media has long been a champion of user rights. We believe the user has an absolute right to own and control their personal information.

As such we created and promoted APML as an open standard very early in our company history. We then started the DataPortability Workgroup. A group dedicated to championing the cause of other open standards by putting them each in context as part of an end-to-end solution stack.

Since then, we have been both gratified and spirited by the support from the worlds thought leaders on the subjects of open standards, social networking and web-based software.

I’d now like to welcome Robert Scoble to the list of supporters and workgroup members. Robert is also a fellow member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup and his tireless efforts to demonstrate how being open, transparent and social can scale to celebrity scales always influences the conversation and helps to shine a spotlight on worthy companies and causes.

Be sure to check out Robert’s recent troubles with Facebook data access and my post to the DataPortability workgroup welcoming Robert and summing up the DataPortability position.

As 2007 rolls to a close, bloggers have started predicting the hot trends of 2008. Data, Semantics and Attention seems like a consistent theme.

Here are some highlights:

Richard McManus (here):

Semantic Apps will become popular in 2008, due to their ability to get better content results and make better data connections. Think search engines like Hakia and Powerset, wikipedia-like efforts like Twine and Freebase, and apps that use semantic technologies under the hood.

We look forward to being involved with the Engagd platform and APML.

The big Internet companies will surprise us all by embracing open standards, and attempting to compete with each other with features instead of data lock-in (OK, this could just be wishful thinking!).

We have already seen Mozilla move in this direction with Weave. Google with OpenSocial. Hopefully 2008 will see true openness with use of existing standards such as those listed at DataPortability.org

Marshall Kirkpatrick says (here):

The value of recommendation engines will become all the more clear; the era of data will be celebrated.

People engaged in the new web will do some really awesome stuff that we’ll all be in awe of.

He writes in a post about the future of RSS:

For anyone who reads feeds, though, prioritization and personalized recommendations are two things that hold a whole lot of promise.

In 2007 both Bloglines and Newsgator were among the companies who moved towards implementing a simple, open Attention Data standard called APML. A wide variety of other companies began experimenting with other methods of systematizing and automating prioritization and recommendation as well. Expect this to be even bigger in 2008.

Web 1.0 was about Pages, Web 2.0 is about People, Web 3.0 will be about data.

Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins dedicates a whole section to APML (here):

You’re going to see bigger partnerships emerge, along that same token, between the APML movement, the OpenID movement, and the big dogs like Microsoft, Facebook and Google. Remember that whole privacy debacle called Beacon? At some point real soon Zuckerberg is going to realize that to keep that very vocal minority of people who like privacy quiet, he’s going to need to give them better ownership of their profile and attention data - APML and OpenID will provide ways for this to happen.

Josh Catone writes:

OpenID will be adopted by more startups and larger web companies, but most people (mainstream users) still won’t use it - that’s a couple of years off.

Perhaps DataPortability will help drive the value proposition.

Alex Iskold writes (here):

Implicit applications, which monitor our habits and automatically infer our likes, will rise.

Looks like 2008 will be an exciting year!

Look forward to working with you all in the near year.

Fav.or.it have announced an intention to support APML on their blog. From the video it looks like a very impressive feed reading app - can’t wait to play with it!

The announcement is on the Fav.or.it blog.

A new staff member joined the Faraday Media team today. Dallas is an old colleague and is helping us out part-time.

In his other job, Dallas is working as a multimedia lecturer at a Technical College just north of Brisbane so he bring a lot of fresh and innovative ideas to the Faraday Team.

Welcome Dallas!

The long awaited update to the APML site is here. We have tried to make it a little less geeky and a little more user-friendly. But we have also expanded the Geek/Developer sections to help you get started quickly!

Check it out at www.apml.org

Announcing the all new Particls Sidebar.

The new Particls Sidebar is your personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to you online.

It’s real-time. It’s animated. It’s social. It’s always there, keeping you informed.

It can also be set to “Auto-hide” so that it takes up less space while keeping users informed.

It is now the default output adapter for Particls. It joins the Ticker (now disabled by default) and Popup Alerts as part of the bundled set of adapters.

Nick Hodge, a Professional Geek at Microsoft says “I think Particls just changed my life. I’ve replaced my Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar with this new version of Particls. Having Particls watch the web for me keeps me on-the-ball, more than caffeine. Well, almost.”

Experience your news, alerts and updates like never before. Subscribe to your feeds, type in your interests and watch them stream in like a slick river of news.

Got a better idea? Write your own output adapter. Particls is the best Alerts and Attention Management Platform around.

Coverage

Coverage has already started…

• Mashable
• Techcrunch
• Nick Hodge