letting things come to me

Since I've become more aware of the Web2.0 revolution, I've noticed more and more web technologies that I'd been thinking about years ago rising to the surface. A key example was an idea I had about online libraries where you list your books, and then other people can browse your library and if appropriate make requests to exchange or borrow books. It would be like an enormous communal, virtual bookshelf, except you'd get to read real books instead of reading off a computer screen (which despite what anyone says is still less comfortable than reading a book! at least to a majority of users...).
Well, now we have Listal, LibraryThing and AllConsuming. I'm not sure who owns them and whether I really want to commit my data to them, but the services are definitely there and doing what I thought such services should do years ago.
Which brings me to my main point. With services like these, I shouldn't have to think about committing my data. My data should reside where I want it to, and I should allow these services access to my data on my terms and conditions.
We need some sort of a platform for maintaining information, and then transforming it and submitting it. Preferably in a relatively extensible and/or standardized way. XML and XSLT style technologies seem to be screaming out to be used in this sort of position.
In addition, we need some sort of voluntary code of conduct whereby we can be reasonably assured that we can reliably dictate the terms under which such services can use our data. Maybe some open source datakeeper software modelled on recent digital rights management advances, so that as well as records companies being able to control our rights on the music we license from them, we can also revoke other organisation's rights on the data they license from us.
Digital rights management isn't necessarily a bad thing, but biased towards the goals of the powerful it is clearly not a good thing.
So the data landscape of the future? Data residing in multiple incarnations on various storage devices across the world, controlled by open source datakeeper software allowing only authorised people to access it, and transform it, using flexible tools. The owners of the data - you and me in addition to the organisations and corporations - empowered by our data's newfound mobility and flexibility.