Content Labeling for increasing trust on the web
As the diversity of material on the Web continues to grow to encompass audio, video, games and all manner of data services alongside traditional documents, it’s becoming very essential to label the contents. In coming years it might be the difference between trust and distrust, so let us start from basics.
What is Content Label?
In literal meaning, content label indicates the label/marking on contents(physical). You may observed content labeling all around you, for example-the coffee you bought from store, also have content labeling, to let you the consumer know the ingredients, manufacturer, expiry date, warning, Side effects etc. Not only the coffee, almost all the products contain content labeling which let the producer be transparent and consumer to be conscious about the product.
Importance of Content Labeling on the net
There are millions of website, online organizations as well as growing numbers of blog/social networking sites throughout the net. Different organization/individual has their own different policies, i.e. no standards between them. Unless you are familiar with the site/blog/the group/the individual you do not have any clue what you are getting into. For example-
A novice user who isn’t familiar with blogosphere, is seeking some information about “how to get most out of adsense”. He will end up with nearly millions of results on search engines, of which 70% will be splog or crook sites. There is no way for him to identify crooks/spam without surfing it, who knows he might even got infected with Trojan or something.
Yes i do know Google and other search engine do trace known Spammy sites and give a warning before you visit. but how many? and they trace only 5% of what actually exist. There goes fear of reaching inappropriate content. There are more, like who is actually providing true information, who follow actually code of conducts(that’s another story!), participating in which site is illegal in your country etc. Final conclusion, you never know what you are into, until you surf, read and do background research. The original content owners also do not have any ways to let the consumer know about them, their products or services, policies, ethics, code of conducts etc. Hell we don’t have even ways to know if we are landing in a weblog or a website.
If you are regular surfer on the net you might have noticed “Hacker safe”, “SSL protected” or different trust logos in some sites. But unless you visit the site, you won’t have any ways to know it. So we need something like “content label” for marking each and every sites/blogs. A standard system,how content providers can inform search engines, aggregators and other data systems, that their content is of a certain type, fulfills certain criteria or meets given requirements.
W3C Content Label Incubator Group, is working on this since last year March. A company name segala is also working on this for bringing it to public. Previously Segala worked on O2 to certify their site WAI compliant (code of conduct). Consider it certification of the website for “codes of conduct� and the rest of the essentials. They also developed a Firefox Plugin called SearchThresher, which allow users to set preferences to only show those sites that are WAI certified. i.e when you use a search engine it will only show the sites that adhere to the agreed code of conduct and filter out the rest. Now Segala is working on ContentLabel.org, for new codes of conduct and have set up an internet wide content-labeling. Not just for static website but as well as blog and e-commerce sites. And that is open for everyone to participate and contribute.
We need this to distinguish the good from the bad, otherwise soon enough there will be just distrust all around us. Daniel K. Appelquist of Vodafone has more technical details of this Content Labeling, you might wanna check that out.
Content Label, Trust on the web, W3C, Segala
