1 Custom-tailored?

Sorry to bring this up, but “custom-tailored” is tautological.

Otherwise, very interesting article, thanks!

posted at 08:30 am on April 19, 2011 by skilldrick

2 I'm going to Instapaper this.

Because I can, just to prove your point. ;) Thanks for the great content. :)

posted at 08:43 am on April 19, 2011 by Jaronoff

3 Creating New Content Types for Better Attribution

I’d love to see the W3C or some other group work toward a common practice that might even become a spec for locking elements together for attribution. This would allow applications like Gimme Bar to collect articles, images, music, etc that’s readily available on the web, but keep the context meaningfully. It could work like a microformat:

<container type=“attribution”>

… content …

</container>

Everything that’s between the containers (choose your own name and don’t gripe about my convention please) gets pulled into the apps that utilize this tech. This gives compensation data points so that it can trace where things come from and go and offers people more opportunity to grow their reputations, brands, and add cash to their wallets.

More cash = better beer, everywhere. This is a good thing.

Press on Mr. Koczon, well written, well thought out.

posted at 09:15 am on April 19, 2011 by squaredeye

6 API of You

Absolutely love the idea of a personal API that keeps all my data/content in one place and allows services to interact with it, rather than the services holding my data/content and forcing me to interact with them to get to it.

I’ve no idea how it could be done technologically (perhaps hosted on your personal site), but to truly own my data—photos, messages, articles I’ve read, scrobble data, things I’ve liked, etc etc,—and then be able to use whichever interface I choose to interact with that data (flickr, facebook, twitter, spotify, last.fm, etc etc) would be a dream come true. It would be like being able to choose whether to edit a JPG in Photoshop or Fireworks… I’d love to have that same freedom with all my online data.

posted at 09:34 am on April 19, 2011 by Armstrong

7

Very excited by this article; I love the idea of an attribution standard that could flow along with content across the web. No more watermarking of photos?! Appropriate support for content creators? Sign me up.

(Fun thought: If we could actually trace the origin and propagation of content across the web, the term “internet registrar” would take on a whole new meaning. Closer to gallery registrar — the person who tracks the path of each artwork, and ensures its authenticity.)

Looking forward to seeing the APIs this article inspires…

posted at 10:10 am on April 19, 2011 by ericaheinz

8 Content attribution and monetization

If we can keep attribution firmly in place…

That’s a pretty huge “if”. I’d like to hear more about how this might be made to work. Are you thinking pay/login walls? HTML spec changes? Honesty of the anonymous content consumer?

posted at 10:18 am on April 19, 2011 by Tony Miller

9 More on content attribution and monetization

Great read, Cameron & great comments. I’m particularly digging (perhaps not surprisingly as someone involved in the Readability project) the angle you’re taking about attribution as a potential source for monetization. How in an ideal world, the further the reach of my content and ideas, the more I might directly benefit.

As is usually the case for me, your comments evoked a passage from Jaron Lanier’s ‘You Are Not A Gadget’, in it (pages 69-70) he writes:

Nelson’s ambitions for the economics of linking were more profound than those in vogue today. He proposed that instead of copying digital media, we should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or a song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it is accessed. [..] As a result, anyone might be able to get rich from creative work. The people who make a momentarily popular prank video clip might earn a lot of money in a single day, but an obscure scholar might eventually earn as much over many years as her work is repeatedly referenced. [..] Someday I hope there will be a genuinely universal system along the lines proposed by Nelson. I believe most people would embrace a social contract in which bits have value instead of being free. Everyone would have easy access to everyone else’s creative bits at reasonable prices—and everyone would get paid for their bits. This arrangement would celebrate personhood in full, because personal expression would be valued.

…here’s to hoping we get there, and perhaps even via more direct means of compensation versus my ads following my content around the web.

posted at 11:37 am on April 19, 2011 by Timothy Meaney

10

Ted Nelson, who invented Hypertext, has been going on about something very similar to this concept for years: he calls it Project Xanadu. Sir Tim Berners Lee came up with HTML and the web we know now, but Nelson’s vision was quite different, and never fully realised. Perhaps this prophesied transition to orbital content will finally fulfil this rival web founder’s vision?

Already it’s HTML5 that really frees up the web for Orbital Content with the new <article> tag.

And Sir Tim was way off with HTML5, in that it’s the WHATWG under Ian Hickson rather than Sir Tim’s W3C that developed and is developing the HTML5 spec.

Ted Nelson talks about monetizing content. Sir Tim never did. Nelson is also particularly fervent about the need to preserve attribution.

So how would we use HTML5 to monetise content and preserve atribution?

The key would be to make liberated content impossible to edit. This will be difficult; it’s an open source web… people will. But the content’s integrity must be maintained in any given context it finds itself. If each <article> could exist as HTML and be impossible to edit in other applications, this problem of attribution would be solved. To preserve attribution, it would just take a well-placed <address> tag in the <footer>, with the contact info marked up using microformats. The idea of ads following content around the web is genius. We would need a new <ad> HTML element, but how hard is that?

Could this really be the revolution that Ted Nelson has been hoping for? I would love to hear Sir Tim’s thoughts on this, and Ted Nelson’s… fascinating stuff!

posted at 12:00 pm on April 19, 2011 by aliblackwell