Happy User Labor Day!
Today is Labor Day, a celebration of the economic and social achievements of workers around the world. Just the right time to introduce our new project, User Labor, to address the issue of the economic sustainability of social web services.
With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.
Web 2.0 services have been assuming the availability of user-generated content in exchange with the utility they offer. For example, in a (needless to say, social) photo sharing service, people upload photos, which create traffic. Traffic creates advertising revenue, which sustains the service. In this cycle, what is supposed to sustain user-generated content is access to the service. However, some user-generated content creates more value for the service than the other. So, how does the service sustain the one that offers higher value, relative to others? In order to answer that question, we need to know how much potential value (i.e. ad revenue) a user generates with how much traffic, through how much content. This is the idea behind User Labor, to determine metrics.
What next? Potential outcomes are, finer use typologies (instead of just power user), richer service offerings (instead of just free and premium), even a new resume format for users to be used across online services… Also, discussions to emerge around how different users can be rewarded, in what terms.
You can read more at User Labor website.
Also see Burak, my partner in crime reporting on User Labor in his blog.
[…] Also see Engin Erdogan’s “Happy User Labor Day”blog post. […]
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nice. i like the implications ulml has on building a reputation economy like in cory doctorow´s novel “backup”. i could never imagine how to measure the “reputation currency” in an elegant way, but thought together with ubiquitous computing ulml seems to be a move in the right direction.
best wishes from berlin!
Helge. Indeed, quantifying the impact of participation can be challenging. We are getting there slowly and before thinking about the currency, we need to come to a consensus on metrics. It is exciting to see how this spec will evolve with input from people like you. Thanks for the support and say hi to Berlin!