The Next Wave of Format

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•Introduction

•The nature of formats

•How new formats come to be

•The state of creative formats on the web today

•The next wave of format

   Formats for coherence

   Formats for diversity

   Formats for navigation

   Formats for flux

   Formats for ubiquity

   Formats for identifying origins

•Conclusion

Formats for identifying origins: Articulating and preserving sponsorship, ownership and authorship

Magazines and television stations resist at times; but they always end up distinguishing paid advertising from editorial material. Readers demand it. On the web, readers will seek the same information, and the formats that evolve may identify sponsorship in far more precise ways. Graphic and text cues will indicate which links on a page, for instance, are paid and which are not. Those who do not include the cues will send a signal that they are trying to keep their sponsorship hidden.

Already, it's clear that the reliability and trustworthiness of the web falters unless people know the sponsorship, ownership and authorship of a document or page. Several times now I have had the unsettling experience of discovering that a piece of writing has been copied and posted on someone else's website. Usually, there is full credit given to me. This poses a dilemma: it's flattering, and probably good for me, to have the work available as widely as possible.

But I lose control. The visible debates in this realm have been over the loss of copyright and opportunities for royalties. I'm less concerned about that; the critical issue is that I lose control over the content itself. I didn't necessarily like it when contentville (the website developed by Steven Brill) posted some old articles I wrote (through a blanket deal with a repackager of old magazine articles) without asking my permission or providing a way to pay me royalties. But I didn't mind it that much. What I hated was the lack of opportunity to add a link back to my own homepage or email address: a way to receive comments, make changes, and keep the material current. Without a link back to a site I control, there is no coherent way to build up a body of work.

Around the same time, a British sociologist typed and posted an old article I had written about suicide to a university website. I stumbled across it and emailed him, requesting a link back to my own homepage. He said he had left the university and had lost his access to the webpage's password — there was literally no way for anyone to change it. Mishaps like this will increasingly take place on the web. Audiences will grow accustomed to looking for format cues that rise above such mishaps by cueing the identity of the author, sponsor and owner. For instance, for every piece of quoted work, people may get accustomed to looking for a "link-back" identifer to a page controlled by the original creator (or his or her heirs). Such formats can't be enforced through technology. They can only evolve through collaborative and self-organizing design.

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