Data Portability is the option to use your personal data between trusted applications and vendors. That’s not as clear as it should be, but it does imply that you own the data, the option to use it, and the decisions about trust.

So what options do vendors have? According to Mike Arrington, they can make announcements about Data Portability while fighting for control of your data, so that Data Portability is the new walled garden.

You can get a more concrete and interactive view of vendor options by playing the game hosted at ReadWriteWeb:

you can choose to play the role of any of 5 different players: Google, MySpace, Microsoft, the Data Portability Project, or Facebook. You can then predict what will happen, or voice your opinion about what should happen. Or both.

These players will no doubt make further moves next week. More then.

Do you want to win a HP HDX Dragon Entertainment Notebook? There is, or has been, a chance to do so every day this month, thanks to HP, its 31 Days of the Dragon promotion, and the participating web sites. Each day, a different site hosts a contest.

Today it’s the turn of last100. To enter, leave a comment there (not here, I have no prizes to give out) “listing your top five digital lifestyle products and/or services.”

I found it difficult to pick just five. Then I reflected that there are satisfactory substitutes for many of the products and services I use. For example, I use Google search and Reader a lot, but wouldn’t be too upset if I had to switch to competing products.

In contrast, here are five products to which I’m attached in one way or another.

• WordPress: this blog lives at WordPress.com.
• Rhapsody streaming music.
• Flickr: here’s my photostream (or at least the public part of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog or its feed, and like looking at photos of kids, please drop me an email).
• Canon PowerShot A540 6MP Digital Camera.
• Sandisk Sansa Clip 1GB MP3 player.

Each of the first three is a software product for which I pay, even in this age of free stuff. For example, I have a Pro account at Flickr. That is of course where the photo lives. It shows the Sansa clip, along with its friends, the ridiculously good value Koss KSC75 headphones.

There is no current shortage of female singer/songwriters. My current favorite among the crowd is Basia Bulat. If I had to categorize her music, it would be as folk, although Rhapsody describes it as Alternative/Punk, and Basia’s MySpace page as “Pop/Folk/Melodramatic Popular Song.”

Her band includes her brother on enthusiastic percussion (and photography, an example of which you see in this post) and Holly the blogging ukulelist. Basia herself switches between guitar and autoharp. You can see her clutching the latter and she and her entourage bop through the woods in the “In the Night” video.

Basia has an album, Oh, My Darling, out, and is due to go back in to the studio this summer to record a second. Her Session at Radio K includes a new song, which I presume will be on the new album. It also includes a full-length version of “Before I Knew,” a short version of which opens the current album.

She also did a Session at Daytrotter, from which this cover of Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You In The End” comes.

Any other Boston area bloggers thinking of going to see Basia on Sunday? She and Devotchka are playing the Paradise.

I was getting out of a rather grumpy mood until I became aware that Crosby Loggins covered “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” and, like a dumb teenager in a horror movie, had to investigate. Crosby Loggins is the son of Kenny.

Young Loggins (Twiggins, as I can’t help thinking of him) murdered the song in the first week of the MTV show Rock the Cradle. He went on to win, the other finalists being Jesse Money and A’Keiba Burrell-Hammer. Perhaps they should form a trio: Twiggins MoneyHammer.

Twiggins’ is the fourth-best version of the song I have heard. (You shouldn’t have to ask how many versions I have heard). Seek it out if you must. It is described on the show’s site as an “Elvis Costello tune.” Well, in a way it is, but surely someone should have pointed out that it was written by Nick Lowe.

For second place, it’s a close thing between Nick Lowe himself and Bill Murray’s karaoke in Lost in Translation. Bill’s version is dreadful, and brilliantly so.

In first place is the great Elvis. In the video, he is such a desperate nerd that I wonder why I didn’t identify with him more closely at the time.

Were I with it, I’d have spent much of today Twittering with excitement from the line to get in to the Boston Apple Store (Terribly Attractive Rad Design). But the BASTARD doesn’t appeal to me, and Twitter was down.

By the way, do you kids today say “with it”? Thought not.

Thoughts on book reviews and rating got bumped out of a post yesterday. Two difficulties were on my mind.

The first concerns the ubiquitous 5-star rating system. I find it very hard to give a perfect score to any book. It’s not just books: I have the same difficulty with music, board games, etc. On the other hand, 3 stars or below seems harsh in these days of grade inflation, sensitivity training, etc. So I tend to give a lot of 4-star ratings.

The second difficulty relates to how thoroughly the reviewer read the book. Some books I don’t finish, usually because I don’t like them. Is it fair to give a low review (e.g, 1-star) to a book on the basis of an incomplete read?

Then there are books that aren’t intended to be “read” in the start-to-finish sense. Reference books fall into this category. I was recently reminded of a less central member of the category: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

Perhaps there should be some symbol accompanying a star rating to indicate how the reviewer has read the book: thoroughly start-to-end, dipped in to, etc.

The 6-word memoir meme has spread to Johnny Bunko, the career guide in manga form (previously). Or rather, it’s spread to the Bunko blog, via the personal blog of author Dan Pink.

It’ll soon be time for Bunko haikus (Bunkus?). Here are a couple, the first of which is merely a compression of the six Bunko lessons into 17 syllables.

Do not plan. Think strengths.
It’s not about you. Persist.
Make great mistakes. Leave mark.

Chopsticks snap at dusk
Hastening a new morning
For Johnny’s career.

Elvis Costello has received a high proportion of my musical attention so far this year. One of the ensuing posts has accounted for a high proportion of this blog’s recent traffic.

I’ve read a couple of books on Costello. This post is about them, and about writing about music, and about writing about books. The first book is Elvis Costello - God’s Comic: A Critical Companion To His Lyrics & Music by David Gouldstone. It’s an update of the same author’s A Man Out of Time. The main difference is that God’s Comic has a chapter on the 1989 album Spike.

Although I enjoyed the extra chapter, and agree with Gouldstone that Spike is among Costello’s best albums, I think that A Man Out of Time is a more coherent book, focusing as it does on Costello’s first decade. The inclusion of good material that reduces the coherence of the whole is appropriate in a book about Costello, especially when the material relates to the sprawl that is Spike.

Writing about music is notoriously difficult. The music blog Dancing About Architecture quotes Costello himself as stating that: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture… it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” Let’s not get into tracing the history of that quote, otherwise we’ll never get back to the books.

I think that Gouldstone does a pretty good job in giving his take on Costello’s music and, especially, lyrics, without claiming that his are the last words or the only right words. The writing in God’s Comic is analytical without being heavy.

In that, it contrasts with the writing of the second book: Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, and the Torch Song Tradition. Consider the following sentence.

He [Costello] readily models existing musical, literary, or cinematic techniques in service of his songs, and in so doing, enhances his lifework’s sonic diversity.

I couldn’t get through even the part of the book on Costello, let alone the rest of it (even though Joni Mitchell also interests me).

At this point, I think that I should bump the thoughts on reviewing books into its own post, and close by remarking that I have high hopes for another book on Costello. It’s Graeme Thomson’s Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello, which will probably be part of my next Amazon order.

Today is Lilac Sunday at the Arnold Arboretum. Lilac Sunday is not usually the best day to enjoy the Lilacs: it’s crowded, it often rains, and chances are the lilacs are not at their absolute peak on that particular day.

Yesterday, we celebrated Lilac Saturday. As you can see, the place was not overrun by our fellow celebrants. You can see more pictures in the set at Flickr.

That said, today looks like a lovely Lilac Sunday. Your tolerance for crowds is probably greater than mine, the sun is shining, and the Lilacs are indeed in bloom.

This blog, like most hosted by WordPress.com, carries ads, albeit not all the time. Automattic controls the ads and gets the money from them. It’s one of the ways in which Automattic makes money from the free WordPress.com service. So this blog, like many hosted by WordPress.com, includes posts about ads and the wish that they were banished from the blog.

The same wish is sometimes expressed on the support forums, although not as often as the wish to be able to control and profit from the ads on one’s blog. People seeking such control and profit seem incapable of using the forum’s search box. The many forum threads include frequent reference to Automattic’s statement that: In the future you’ll be able to purchase an upgrade to either turn the ads off or show your own ads and make money from your blog.

This is course raises the question of how much such an upgrade might cost. I just saw an estimate from the redoubtable raincoaster.

But my guess (and it’s a total guess) is that if there were an upgrade to take Adsense off your blog, it would have to cost at least ten bucks a month. So $120 a year, just to replace the income WP.com makes from the average blog here.

Raincoaster doesn’t work for Automattic or for Google, and she did stress that she’s guessing. But I’d take her “total guess” over a confident prediction by many other people. In particular, I’m inclined to think that she’d got the decimal point in the right place.

I’m also inclined to think that most of us who were planning an upgrade to ad-free had in mind an annual cost of $15 or thereabouts, in line with other upgrades. If it would cost Automattic around 10 times that, we might be waiting a long time for an upgrade we’d care to pay for.