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
Comments