ACAP Blog
ACAP: facilitating dialogue
I have been travelling widely in the last month, taking the ACAP message to various meetings and events in Europe and the United States. Aside from leaving me temporarily rather deaf (presumably too many ascents and descents in too short a time), I have been left with what I hope will prove to be some rather more enduring legacies.
One of these was the result of a discussion following my presentation at the Online News Association (ONA) conference in Washington DC on September 12. This is a very busy and lively event, and I was invited to present ACAP in one of three parallel tracks; I got an audience of something over 100 people for a one hour session.
My presentation of ACAP, as is often the case, engendered quite lively debate on a number of issues. One thread was the concern (expressed by Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com) that ACAP poses a threat to journalism since it would involve “locking away” news, when the greatest value in what Jeff calls the “link economy” lies in making content as widely available as possible; he holds that it is therefore incumbent on news providers to find some way of monetising that ubiquity. My response to this was the same as always: nobody (least of all me) denies that this provides the basis for a potential business model (and like any other business model is one which is fully supportable within the ACAP framework). However, it is simply not the case that, for the future, there is only one conceivable business model for content on the web; and it is (and should remain) open to publishers to choose which business model they wish to adopt for the publication of their content. ACAP’s role is to enable innovation and diversity in business models, and certainly does not suggest that publishers should hide their content from search.
However, it was another thread of the discussion that in retrospect has really caught my attention. This was about the potential of some elements of the ACAP specification to be used maliciously for “cloaking” – for example, leading a search engine inadvertently to point users at malware, which they might download by clicking on an apparently legitimate search result for something entirely innocent.
We accept that there is real possible hazard here; ACAP has always acknowledged this. However, I think the problem is substantially overstated. Because in the end, it can easily be overcome by the establishment of a trusted relationship between crawler and crawled. It seems to me that, rather than worrying about the risks of cloaking, we should rather be concerned about seeking solutions that resolve this general problem of establishing trustworthiness.
I found this view being confirmed only three days later in an interview which Tim Berners Lee gave to the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7613201.stm). Although he was talking about the need for creating trust in information on the web in a slightly different context – primarily seeking to answer the question: how you distinguish between good and bad science on the web – the challenge is by no means dissimilar. The network provides a platform for both reliable and unreliable providers of information in all fields of human endeavour. How do we distinguish between them? From an ACAP point of view, how can we find ways that are acceptable and reliable for indicating (at a machine-to-machine level) that a website is not going to indulge in maliciously inspired cloaking?
Don’t expect to find an instant answer to that question here. Although I have for a long time been working on a model that identifies authority (a concept similar but not identical to brand) as an enduring source of added value in the information value chain, a clear mechanism for the establishment of monetisable authority on the internet continues to prove elusive. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we should indeed be focusing more on finding ways of establishing trustworthiness in web content than in explaining why it cannot be done.
One significant effect of ACAP has been to open up a number of crucial debates between different communities –between the different sectors of the content industries, as well as between the content industries and the search community. We are all learning a lot – and we are very pleased that ACAP has facilitated that process.
Mark Bide, ACAP Project Director
Posted: 08/10/2008 09:23:46 by
Heidi Lambert | with 0 comments
ACAP Implementation
This ACAP blog is being written at the end of three very busy weeks for the project. I have had a lot of enquiries from journalists, interested in the progress of ACAP following our dialogue in the press with Google, and one question they all seem to want an answer to is “Why are publishers being so slow to implement ACAP?”
This seems to me to be a rather startling question. We published the specification for ACAP only in November last year. Publishers implementing ACAP now are doing so to show that they want and intend to use ACAP in the long term to control the policies they set for the reuse of their content. Implementation now, while it has no practical effect, is just one way of showing support, alongside joining ACAP and pledging technical or financial resources to helping development. While implementation is not a large task technically, as the growing list of sites which have done it shows, it still has to take its place in the queue of tasks to be done. And for the time being, it has no effect until it is also implemented by search engines and other intermediaries. Until this changes, publishers will be expressing their policies in language that no one is actively interpreting.
In these circumstances, it seems to me that the question that journalists should be asking is “How have you persuaded so many publishers to implement ACAP so quickly?” The list is growing all the time – at least 16 countries represented at the last count, and publishers ranging from household names to individual bloggers. And these are just the ones who have told us that they have already implemented. There is an even longer list of publishers who have committed to implement.
How are we achieving this traction? Well, to me it’s pretty obvious. ACAP is an idea whose time has come. Everyone can understand that it isn’t possible to manage content supply on the network in the absence of machine-to-machine communication, and that communication requires a standard language for the expression of permissions and other policies. ACAP has been designed to fill that gap.
Although ACAP is sometimes characterised as being simply about the relationship between a small group of large publishers and a small group of large search engines, the reality is different. Our first set of Use Cases may have had a focus on search, and this is reflected in ACAP v1.0. But it is only 1.0; the beginning, not the end.
Mark Bide, ACAP Project Director
Posted: 07/04/2008 14:41:29 by
Heidi Lambert | with 0 comments
Business case for ACAP between publishers and search engines
The ability to express much more sophisticated sets of permissions for access and use of content in the network environment in machine readable form is an essential step towards building robust and mutually beneficial business models for content distribution in the 21st Century. Business relationships between content owners and intermediaries have until now been limited to unrefined “bulk” deals. It is always risky to predict future business models, which are created by the complex ecosystem of the market; ACAP is not intended to formulate future business models, but to enable a broader range of more sophisticated and refined potential business models than is currently possible.
We believe that, to this end, the development of open, flexible and extensible enabling standards is a critical component:
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Machine‐to‐machine communication is essential – the scale of the content value chain on the network is such that human intervention in every content transaction is inconceivable
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Communication standards are essential to the effective conduct of many‐to‐many business relationships – the alternative of multiple bilateral communication protocols is unscalable from both cost and manageability perspectives
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Flexibility and extensibility are necessary, because our ability to forecast future requirements in a period of rapid and unpredictable change is low
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Openness is critical to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible; proprietary solutions can only result in a reduction in competition, to everyone’s detriment
What types of new business might result from the development of ACAP, for search engines and publishers working in partnership?
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Beginning with content that is freely available on the web, ACAP will allow publishers to be more confident about the use to which their content is put, allowing discrimination (for example) between trusted and untrusted partners and between different usages. ACAP will allow (again as an example) time‐based factors to be taken into account in spidering rules, giving publishers much finer control over dissemination of content at different stages in its life‐cycle
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With content that is currently not publicly available, ACAP will create the technological framework for web site owners to allow access to content behind firewalls (book content,for example) with much finer control of the conditions under which it can be spidered – giving confidence to publishers that they can retain a direct influence over what is displayed to users and other access conditions – thus increasing the publishers’ confidence that in making their content available for search they are not damaging their core business models
Posted: 26/03/2008 11:59:56 by
Heidi Lambert | with 0 comments
Guide Update
You should now have received a personal letter from ACAP Chairman Gavin O’Reilly calling on everyone to implement ACAP. We cannot stress enough how important implementation is at this stage – to put out the message that we all care about how our content is used online. The simple level of implementation which we are asking everyone to undertake is a quick and entirely painless process and has no impact on the functionality or use of your site(s).
The implementation guide is online at http://www.the-acap.org/Implement-ACAP.aspx
Implementation in general is starting to happen. What we need as soon as possible,
however, is to develop a critical mass, to bring all the players on board and to make ACAP an effective communications tool of your permissions information.
Posted: 26/03/2008 11:37:37 by
Heidi Lambert | with 0 comments