Creating Proprietary Content is Like ‘Writing in Sand’
We’ve written a lot lately about data portability and content ownership and how these debates relate to the open web. The issues are complex and thorny, but there is a simple way to solve them — put all your data in the public domain.
The video above is an interview from Open Media Web with Tantek ???elik, the man behind Microformats and a host of other great ideas, in which he touts the Digg content model as a way of circumventing content ownership issues.
???elik starts off by defining the open web as consisting of two components — access to your data in both directions (reading and writing) and portability. He then goes on to argue that proprietary services, which are more concerned with content ownership, are ultimately, “like writing in sand — you might as well be building sandcastles… the sandcastles get wiped out by the next wave and that’s exactly what will happen to your content.”
Digg, on the other hand, puts all your submissions, your Digg created content, comments etc, under a Creative Commons public domain declaration, which means anyone is free to do anything they want with what you post.
That’s the ultimate in portability — it’s there for anyone to take and share and move and I really like that model because it basically says if you want to play on the open web you have to contribute your snippets — things like comments and tags and stuff — you have to contribute to the open domain.
And ???elik isn’t just talking, he’s putting these ideas into motion like on the made mandatory microformats wiki which now, much like the Digg example, requires that all contributed content be placed in the public domain.
Other highlights from the video include ???elik’s observation that proprietary tools/formats almost always precede open formats, but in doing so serve as a nice way of mapping out what aspects of the format are useful and which aren’t. Market pressure then eventually forces an open alternative that gets to skip the R&d stage and head right to the aspects that the market has already determined are most important. In other words, proprietary tools tend to pave the way for open tools.
On the whole a great interview and a number of interesting ways to move toward creating a more open web.
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