Saving Journalism via RDFa, JSON-LD, and Linked Data

Hi all,

We're building a set of next generation universal Web Payment
technologies that build on top of RDFa, JSON-LD and Linked Data (in
general). Just a quick ping to explain how we're using this stuff in an
attempt to save journalism on the Web.

The PaySwarm Developer API and development website were launched today
in an attempt to make payments frictionless on the web. The goal is to
find a way to help journalists and bloggers make a living via their
websites and blogs. The general idea is outlined here:

http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/09/12/payswarm-api/

PaySwarm is intended to be an open, patent and royalty-free technology.
We hope to send it through the W3C or IETF standardization process one
day. Now, what does RDFa have to do with all of this? Well, the system
is decentralized, so we needed a decentralized way to describe people
and assets for sale.

We're working with the WebID community, which is working on the
distributed identity problem - RDFa is one way in which one's identity
can be serialized in a distributed way:

http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/08/07/webid/

The other problem concerns describing assets for sale as well as the
licenses that are associated with those assets in a distributed way.
RDFa to the rescue again - authors can describe their assets via RDFa -
things like title, summary, license, payment information, etc.:

(you will have to fake-purchase the full article in the demo in order to
see a completed contract - which describes the asset and license in
JSON-LD. Look for "Your Purchased Contract" to see what a basic contract
looks like as Linked Data):

https://payswarm.com/demos/oauth/news/previews/1

We don't see a world where everyone must pay for every page they visit,
but rather, we'll see a great deal of free content out there, but also
see a smattering of paid content to ensure that people can still make a
living as a writer. However, in order to make this work, we have to find
a way to make payments universal and nearly frictionless on the Web.
This is what PaySwarm is all about:

http://payswarm.com/

We hope that providing a freely available PaySwarm development platform,
coupled with demos (including source code), will help people better
understand where PaySwarm can be used in existing websites and blogs.
The source code for the demo, including everything necessary to hook
into the PaySwarm API can be found here:

http://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm-news-demo

We are committed to one open Web, which is why we are releasing the demo
as open source and will be fully documenting the API and releasing what
is necessary to implement the PaySwarm API (both server and client) in
the coming months to years.

We are talking with W3C and IETF to try and figure out a way to bring
this work to a standardization body, and while that is a very long way
away, we are committed to creating a universal payment mechanism for the
web that is open as well as patent and royalty-free.

At this point, we're looking for anyone that would be interested on
collaborating with us on this endeavor - researchers, companies,
universities or hobbyists. All that is required is curiosity... all are
welcome and appreciated :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Making Payments Frictionless, Saving Journalism
http://digitalbazaar.com/2010/09/12/payswarm-api/

Received on Monday, 13 September 2010 17:12:12 UTC