xdiscipline Thoughts across disciplines by Engin Erdoğan

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.

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A stock’s detail page in Meta-Markets

Meta-Markets is an experiment on which I have been collaborating with my two close friends, Burak Arıkan and Cenk Dölek. Burak, the ultimate prototyper, single-handedly put the core together with his endless energy and spent by far the most effort on it. Cenk, the perfectionist, has created the interactive graphs for stocks and is tying lots of loose ends together to make things work at their best.

One of our aims with this project is to explore the value of online immaterial labor through leveraging the mechanics of stock markets. We have questions. How can we ascribe value to the creative work that people put in to exist - express themselves and connect to others - in online environments? Can we approach these efforts as products? If these products are one’s intellectual property, can owners offer their products to public for raising capital and to make better products?

Market activity in the last 48 hours

To explain things in a more practical way: In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital.

Currently, we have markets based on product categories such as blogs, photos, etc. And we selected pilot services for these product categories based on the accessibility of their APIs. In the end, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, and Feedburner became our initial set. Obviously, these services are represantative of their respective categories and we are planning to introduce more than one service in each category as long as we have access to their APIs.

4 markets active, more to come

Our experiment is still in its early stages. In tech speak, we are in private alpha. We are dealing with everything from server load to semantics on a daily basis. Our user base, which started with friends and friends-of-friends, is now extending to a variety of curious, ambitious, and tolerant people. Hopefully pretty soon, we will come to a stable enough state when we can open up the membership to all creative souls.

If you would like to keep an eye on what’s happening in Meta-Markets, check out our development journal.

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