Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) has put together an influential group who yesteday posed a proposal for a Bill of Rights for "users of the social Web." Read Joseph’s post about it.

I like the way the traces users generate is now increasingly getting described as an activity stream. There’s a shift taking place from fixed pages to a flow of actions on objects.

Here’s the text:

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington
September 4, 2007

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their
  friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service,
  using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their
  site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup
  within the service.