Help enable more trust on the Web
Are you interested in creating a new code of conduct to help enable more trust on the Web?
Sign up now and become a named ‘contributor’ on contentlabel.org. This will be the central source where industry will contribute to enabling more trust on the Web using Content Labels.
Contributors already signed up
Sam Sethi has already volunteered to create and run the wiki
Tom Raftery has kindly volunteered to create the blog
Daniel Appelquist David Rooks Sorcha Moore are amongst the keen to get involved
You?
A site is being built specifically for new codes of conduct and best practices. We hope to have a first cut before Christmas.
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ICRA has been involved with content labelling since Noah was a lad so I’m delighted to see the basic concept being adapted and improved to become more useful. As chair of ther relevant W3C group, I’m really looking forward to seeing how this new community takes off and will, of course, be working hard alongside companies like Segala to make it happen.
[…] But adult content is not the only possible application for content labels. For example, a content label can tell you whether a Web site is accessible (has it followed the W3C’s WAI guidelines?). A content label can tell you if the content is appropriate for educational needs. A label can also tell you if content is mobile friendly, and that’s the theory underlying the work that the Mobile Web Best Practices working group is undertaking with mobileOK. Content labels can also be an important enabler in the field of content search and discovery, particularly on the mobile Web. This is what Google mobile sitemaps (for example) are all about — explicitly telling the search engine (the content discovery agent) about the content so the user doen’t have to wade through pages of search results to find what they’re looking for. So it’s clear that a number of industry requirements are converging on the idea that some kind of metadata will be fed upstream from content providers to browsers and content discovery agents. But can these content labels be built on top of open, inter-operable standards? And will they be trustable? These are some of the questions that the Web Content Labels incubator group (WCL-XG) has sought to answer. This group is likely going to transform into a fully fledged W3C working group some time in the new year in order to develop its initial recommendations into a new W3C standard. This standard could enable a whole ecosystem of labeled content, labeling authorities and label verification services. You can already see glint of how this could work by downloading the Search Thresher Firefox plugin. Bottom line: content labels built on top of open standards mean more machine-readable data on the Web, which translates to better user experience and ease of use. Verification of these labels mean a more trustable Web. Labels are definitely coming into the mainstream. I fully expect content labels to be a ubiquitous within the next two years — users won’t necessarily even know they exist, but they will be silently improving the trustability and usability the Web. If you want to be ahead of the curve, hop to ICRA.org’s label generator and generate yourself an ICRA label. […]
Content labels are, of course, about far more than ‘just’ child protection and disability legislation compliance. As such, the proposal that we have a single site at which existing labels may be registered, and from which proposers of new labels can absorb best practice, seems like a great idea.
The various uses of the content label around asserting trust, authenticity, authority, veracity, appropriateness and compliance strikes me as both immensely valuable and eminently achievable; a truly compelling exemplar for many of those Semantic Web ideas and ideals we’ve talked about for so long.
I look forward to seeing what others can achieve, and to contributing our efforts where appropriate and useful.
The concept is very good indeed. In fact it has long been overdue. We have so many meetings, conference going on but sadly “code of conduct” never became subject matter, where it should have been.
But this concept have to make it crystal clear that, it isn’t intended to policing someones freedom to express but intended for clean and transparent web environment.
> it isn’t intended to policing someone’s freedom to express but intended for clean and transparent web environment.
Absolutely Kamrul - it’s about providing a choice. Some readers will like the choice and some won’t. Some blogs will like to be differentiated and some won’t…
Perhaps when we look at a code of conduct for blogs specifically, it’ll be extended to ‘blogs’ – i.e. all commentators and not just authors.
Hi Paul, I am interested in finding out more. Perhaps opting for self-certification to start with. Thanks for the note on my blog.
Have a great X’mas, mate
Regards
Manoj