Re: Evolution of the RWW -- a Temporal Web -- Towards Web 4.0 (?)

On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 1:20 PM Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, 18 May 2021 at 16:52, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I want to publish this to the Web, but not for $0.00 since there is a
>> serious opportunity cost associated with the production of the work in
>> question.
>>
> Publishing we can do too.  But you want to do access control and also paid
> access control.  Or a pay wall or something like this.
>

Perhaps the relationship between cost, consumption, and reward needs
explored a little more here.

The assumption here is a traditional digital marketplace where copies of
the digital item have a fixed cost, that's likely pay to access. Due to the
nature of both this data and it's format, the potential *direct *audience
is likely very small.

Kingsley's use case is very interesting, because the data created can be
seen as having different values to different people/entities, and
ultimately the most appreciative would be people who would consume the data
as part of a different medium, such as on a wiki page, in a book, or even
just relevant parts in discography of information whilst they listen to an
album.

I'd argue that the optimal solution would be reward based
microtransactions, where appreciation/reward could flow from the end
consumer back to the original creator. An important aspect of this is that
it flips the transaction around, such that the set of consumers define
value of the thing, as opposed to the creator asserting a cost and charging
it before it access, or chasing it as is commonly seen in the world of
royalties (see the mess of dead youtube videos due to claims from
distributors and corps). This reward based approach facilitates a much
broader audience with a fairer reflection of value.

To me this feels like a very common scenario, that doesn't have a solution
as yet, it's no different to a transcluded photo on a web page, a quoted
tweet in a new article, a portion of a song in a video, a bug fix pull
request on github, a viral meme - all things which have real value which is
not transferred or reflected, or all too often simply stolen by the
republisher.

Sure many things are suited to a fixed price, physical goods, credits for
api usage, anything with an easily quantifiable base cost, but there's a
whole world of creative and information based things where the true value
is ultimately unknown, and all too often lost or exploited, if Kinglsey's
use case is to be solved, it may warrant looking at the full problem.