Gneumatic

User Labor Markup Language (ULML) is described as “an open protocol for sharing the value of user’s [sic] labor across the web.” User labor is defined as the work that people put in to create, improve, and maintain their existence in social web:

• generating assets (e.g. user profiles, images, videos, blog posts)
• creating metadata (e.g. tagging, voting, commenting etc.)
• attracting traffic (e.g. incoming views, comments, favourites)
• socializing with other people (e.g. number of friends, social influence)

These kinds of statistics usually remain buried in log files or accessible only to platform operators through complex and expensive metrics analysis software. By creating an open, transparent data structure ULML’s creators hope to initiate standard metrics for user participation, which, in turn, can serve as a benchmark by which to compensate/reward the contributor-users whose labor sustains profitable online communities like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Nice TED video of Yochai Benkler describing the factors behind the emergence of social production. One of the interesting points he makes is that Google’s most critical innovation has been to essentially “outsource” the decision of relevance to the web community as a whole by counting links to determine page rank. Wouldn’t normally think of this as “peer production” or “collaboration” and yet it certainly is.

Here’s the link.