How to avoid building a fenced garden?

Question

Some friends and I had an idea for a website, and I started working on it. He will rely on people contributing to the creation of a common knowledge base, and people will also be able to create personal profiles with a reasonable amount of data. We intend that people should be able to use their content on other sites (for example, flickr, youtube) when creating their profile on our site.

It occurred to us that we want to be good citizens on the Internet and make our site accessible and useful for people, regardless of whether they have an account or not. We also want to make sure that any data that people enter on our site is not "locked up" and is accessible to other sites accordingly.

Are there any specific methods that we should follow and similar ones that we should avoid?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I suggest you follow the example of this site itself.

Use OpenID for non-anonymous accounts / login, but allow anonymous posting.

Answer 2

You should take a look at attaching a specific license to the content on your site. For example, StackOverflow uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License for all content. Depending on what restrictions you want to place when using the content of your sites, you should study something like this.

Answer 3

You can use OpenID for authentication. I would recommend providing options for exporting your data to open standards, if such standards exist for the data you are dealing with. For example, if you have any news or event feeds, provide an RSS feed for them. If there are no standards for the data you work with, then provide a good way for your customers to get it in a reasonable format; preferably a REST style with data in reasonable serialization like XML or JSON .