DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

If you're anything like me, Google stores a lot of your data. This blog (brilliantly customised to be hosted on my website by shopfitter.com). Most of my photos are in Picasa web albums. If someone comes up with a snazzier solution, how do you transfer all that stuff?

An engineering team at Google looked into this and concluded that, although you can get data out of any Google product, some are easier to work with than others. Thus was born the tongue-in-cheek Data Liberation Front (DLF). The DLF now reckon they have liberated about two thirds of the Google products, making it easy to get your data out again.

The DLF is a smart move. As InformationWeek point out: the "move comes as the company is being assailed by competitors, interest groups, and the government for its online ad dominance and its digital book ambitions." In PR and the news game: timing is all.

It's also smart as people don't like feeling trapped and this makes other data storers look less liberal.

If you need to change apps, have a look at DLF's site & blog:

http://www.dataliberation.org/
http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/

The Data Liberation team "hosts the Google Blog Converters open source project. This project also powers a hosted conversion service with support for migrating from WordPress, MovableType, and Livejournal."

Labels: Blogger, cloud computing, data liberation front, Google, Google apps