What OpenID Can Do for Academic Publishers

Liza Daly
May 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

OpenID is a free, decentralized system for managing your identity online. What does that mean? It's easy to explain by example.

Right now you probably have dozens of accounts on different Web sites. It's likely that you use the same (or similar) user names and passwords on all of them. OpenID solves the problem of creating nearly-identical accounts on different services, and also allows you to control how much personal information you provide to each service that asks for your OpenID.

What makes OpenID interesting in the publishing community is that it distinguishes between two concepts that are often conflated:

1. Identity: Who am I?
2. Authentication: What do I have access to?

Traditional user name and password schemes are used for both purposes, but they are actually quite different.

Identity only -- When I shop at Amazon.com (assuming I'm not boycotting it), I only need to provide my identity. I don't need any special permission to access Amazon's search and browse features. What I do want to protect are my account information and shopping cart, but arguably those belong to me, not Amazon.

Identity and authentication -- When I want to post to the TOC blog, I need to provide both types of credentials: identity, so the blog software can put my name under my post, but also authentication to prove that I'm a registered contributor. If you write a comment to this post, you'll only be asked to provide identity.

Authentication only -- The third case -- authentication without identity -- is common in subscription-based journals and research material. I can go to the Boston Public Library, sit at a terminal, and get access to hundreds of online resources in the deep web that aren't available to the general public. The library has paid for the right to access the resources, but those sites only need to know that I'm authenticated through an institutional subscription, not who I am as an individual. This is the correct default behavior, and it's admirable that librarians fight hard on behalf of patrons to explicitly protect users' identities.

This leaves academic and journal publishers without an obvious way to offer their users some of the benefits of identity-based systems: bookmarking, tagging, annotating, and sharing. One solution is to build another layer of access control: first I authenticate, either by using a library terminal or entering my library card number, and then I identify myself with yet another user name and password. Only then do I get the ability to save searches, bookmark documents and possibly share those with other authenticated users of the resource.

Publishers could instead use OpenID to handle identity management in these products. Compared with building such a system from scratch, OpenID is inexpensive and is already fully-implemented in many programming languages.

Users benefit in several ways: they don't have to create a new account and remember another set of credentials, and now they have new options for personalizing their research experience. It also opens up the possibility of tying together saved resources across multiple products owned by different publishers, similar to some types of citation management software.

Currently, signing up and using OpenID can be a bit confusing for novices, but the user experience is expected to improve. In the near future it's likely to be largely opaque to end-users, who will only need to know that their identity is managed by a source they already trust.

One last point that's relevant to library users: an OpenID account can still provide anonymity. There's no requirement or guarantee that my OpenID account name has anything to do with my legal name. It's likely that many users will have multiple OpenIDs in the same way that people use throwaway email accounts when registering on Web sites. However, the onus is still on the end-user to be careful where and how they distribute their personal information.

Related Stories:

• OpenID.net: "What Is OpenID?"
• Pros and Cons of OpenID
• OpenID on the Upswing
• IDPF: Boundaries of Participation

Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games

Liza Daly
May 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Publishers are experimenting with an emerging form of interactive entertainment known as Alternate Reality Games (ARG). ARGs are mediated by the Web but they also extend into the real world, with players traveling to physical places and interacting with game characters via email, text messaging, Twitter, and even "old-fashioned" telephones.

I spoke to the founders of ARG design firm Fourth Wall Studios, the company that created the first publishing ARG, Cathy's Book. I wanted to know if ARGs are a viable form of commercial storytelling, if they can be packaged up after the experience has ended, and if they can engage with a wider audience beyond hard-core gamers.

Q: Do you think the high level of engagement required of an ARG limits the audience? Is there such a thing as a "casual" ARG, that can be enjoyed in the spare moments between soccer practice and dinner time?

A: Elan Lee, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Designer: ARGs up until now have been like rock concerts. Thousands (if not millions) of people come together at one point in time to collectively experience something incredible. They have a good time, sing along, maybe buy a t-shirt, but when they go home to tell their friends about it, there's no action their friends can take other than to hope they don't miss the next one. The traditional ARG is an experience that exists between the start and end date of the campaign, and if you weren't there at the right time, you simply miss out.

To continue the metaphor, think of our games [at Fourth Wall] as ARG "albums" instead of concerts: something you can play when, where, and how you want. Ultimately, it is only through this "album" approach that this new form of entertainment is going to evolve into a mainstream genre of storytelling.

Q: Many ARGs have been developed as promotional tools for other media: music releases, films, TV series, video games, and now books. Is there a perception that ARGs have to be in support of something else, rather than entertainment themselves?

A: Elan Lee: ARGs have had their roots in marketing because frankly, at this early stage, that's a great place to find money. Marketers have a tougher job every day of finding ways to get their message heard above the noise, and they have a lot of money to throw at the problem. It's a great situation for both sides: marketers get to engage their audience in a way that attracts, involves, and maintains an audience around a product. ARGs benefit in that we get to run wild and ground-breaking experiments as we birth this new art form.

Also, at least in the case of Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero and Cathy's Book, the ARG elements were not conceived as marketing, but as an inextricable part of the content. An album or a book was the spine of the experience, but the work of art itself was conceived as an interactive multimedia whole.

Q: Cathy's Book was targeted at a young adult (YA) audience. Do you think YA is a strong market for this kind of interactive entertainment? Would it be possible to engage even younger children?

A: Sean Stewart, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Creative: Cathy's Book and the new hardcover, Cathy's Key, are designed to be first and foremost a fun (and funny) adventure story. We've added a lot of "fourth wall" elements -- you can call Cathy's phone number and leave her a message, investigate clues she doesn't have time to investigate or write to email addresses you find in the book and see what responses come back to you. Cathy even hosts a gallery where readers can submit their own artwork -- the best of which will be published in the paperback of Cathy's Key. The basic impulse behind this series is to make books -- a traditionally passive, solitary activity -- something with an active, social component as well.

"Fourth Wall" fiction -- experiences that play out at least partly over your browser, your phone, your life -- feels somehow very right for this new age; it's a kind of storytelling that arises naturally from the world of three-way calls, instant messenger, text messaging, and shooting a friend an email with a link to something cool you saw on the Web. To that extent, it's going to feel the most natural to the people most comfortable with that kind of wired world.

When I was in New York last year, meeting with the publisher of Cathy's Book, my 12-year-old daughter emailed me a PowerPoint slide deck, complete with music and animations, explaining why I should get her a Mac laptop for Christmas. Yeah, I think her generation finds interactive entertainment more natural than mine. And yes, I think it would be not only possible, but really effective to build interactive, exploratory stories for even younger kids -- but to do that, we need to get away from the traditional ARGs willingness to be confusing. Most people like to have some clue what the heck they are supposed to do next. It won't surprise you to learn that this is another crucial design issue Fourth Wall Studios has set out to solve.

Q: Reading is usually a solitary pursuit, but there's an almost universal desire to "live" in some genres, whether it's idealized period romances, spy novels, or detective stories (murder mystery parties, especially popular in the 1980s, illustrate this). How important are traditional fiction genres in ARG? Can there be an element of role-playing involved? Are there genres that haven't been explored yet that have potential?

A: Sean Stewart: The first paid writing I ever did, actually, was for live action role playing games and murder mystery dinner parties in the '80s. I never would have guessed that writing for those things would turn out to be extremely important training for me, but in fact the intersection of writing and theater, where you try to find ways for the audience to participate in the story, lies at the heart, I think, of the next evolution in storytelling.

We believe that immersing yourself in a world is a fundamental part of what makes fiction fun. Any time I follow a character -- whether in a Jane Austen novel or a "Matrix" movie -- I am imagining what that must be like. One of the biggest pay-offs in an ARG is that you don't just imagine a fictional world, as in a book, or see it, as in a movie: you actually inhabit it. When I read a Harry Potter novel, I get to go to Hogwarts vicariously; when I play an ARG, I get to go myself. I am finding Web sites on my browser, I am talking to characters on my phone: the world of the fiction has reached out to me.

That proposition, by the way, shouldn't be limited by genre. ARGs have often had a thriller/science fiction slant to them, but even inside our games we've done romantic comedies, spy plots, documentary-style slice-of-life experiences, tragedies, and even Westerns. Fourth-wall fiction isn't about a given genre: it's a set of tools and approaches for letting the audience participate in any kind of story.

Q: What happens when the game is over? Is it possible to package up an ARG as a complete work (whether online or in print) to be experienced linearly? Or is the experience meaningless without real-time participation?

A: Elan Lee: Here's where I'm going to try to get as much mileage out of the "rock concert" metaphor as I can. There is no denying the electric energy present at a concert and there is absolutely no substitute for "being there." However, there are only so many available seats per venue, and only so many venues you can play before exhaustion sets in (both for the artist and the audience). For ARGs to evolve into a mainstream form of entertainment, they must create their own version of "albums" to complement the "concert." Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we have to find a way to put a package around these things and call it a day; I only suggest that both pieces of the experience must exist for the real potential of the form to be realized.

Related Stories:

• What Makes a Collaborative Writing Project Successful?
• Nabokov's Final Novel: The Perfect Mash-Up Source
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?

What Makes a Collaborative Writing Project Successful?

Liza Daly
May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Penguin's collaborative writing experiment A Million Penguins was launched in February 2007 and completed in March 2007. This month saw its final scholarly assessment published in a research report out of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

The results? Terrible, according to Gawker, echoing a consensus that the project failed as literature. As a study of online behavior, though, it's quite fascinating, and the research paper describes examples of all types of user contributions, from the grandiose and self-serving to the quietly constructive.

But if "every book needs its author," game-like fiction has been shown to be more amenable to collaboration. Each of Penguin's We Tell Stories pieces was co-written by interactive developers and a novelist. This month, the Guardian has launched a participatory interactive fiction project.

Although technically a type of computer game, interactive fiction has a long association with print authors, starting with the commercially successful adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984). In 2003 Adam Cadre (Ready, Okay!, HarperCollins, 2000) wrote the game Narcolepsy incorporating 12 dream sequences written by different authors (of which I was one). In a more experimental vein, the recent UpRightDown project released its first story, which generated submissions in multiple media, including some interactive works.

One lesson from these experiments is that while a work of fiction may not need a single author, it does need a single editor or authority to weave together disparate contributions and reject the obvious vandals. A unified final work has the potential to be a marketable product rather than a research project. (On the other hand, if the printed German Wikipedia sells, all bets are off.) Scale is important as well: two or even three dozen contributors are probably manageable; A Million Penguins had 1,700.

The Guardian's interactive fiction project is being managed using wiki software at textadventure.org.uk. The organizers are soliciting both programmers and non-technical writers. It is scheduled to run through at least the end of May.

Related Stories:

• Q&A; with WEbook President Sue Heilbronner
• German Wikipedia Coming in Book Form
• Nabokov's Final Novel: The Perfect Mash-Up Source
• Experimenting for the Sake of Experimenting
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?

Iliad Book Edition E-Reader Coming to UK

Liza Daly
May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Just in time for our discussion on the ideal e-book reader comes a new product that will be the first e-reader sold in the United Kingdom.

Trading Wi-Fi for increased storage and an overall price drop, the iLiad Book Edition is a successor to the iLiad 2. Both use the same iRex e-ink technology and feature a tablet-based touch screen. There is no bundled online service or book store, but both iLiads have support for open formats such as PDF. 50 public domain books are preloaded.

Borders UK will sell the device in a small number of stores, and will launch an online ebook store shortly thereafter.

Unfortunately, even this "reduced" price of £399/€499 is unlikely to win over e-reader skeptics, especially without network connectivity. Buying books will always require tethering the device to a computer and completing the purchase over the Web.

Other iLiad Book Edition technical specs:

• 8.1-inch (diagonal) Electronic Paper Display
• 8.5 inch high x 6.1 inch wide, weight 15.3 ounces
• 768 x 1024 pixels resolution, 160 DPI, 16 levels of grey-scale
• File formats supported: PDF, HTML, TXT, JPG, BMP, PNG, PRC (Mobipocket)
• 128MB accessible flash memory; storage expandable via USB, MMC or CF cards
• Built-in stereo speakers and mini-headphone jack
• USB Connectivity to PC
• Optional external 10/100MB Ethernet networking via Travel hub

Related Stories:

• The Bookseller: "BA: iLiad 'not iPod moment for books'"
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?
• Ergonomics and Ebook Success
• Toward a More Touchable E-Book
• Ebook Format Primer

Tutorial: Add AB Meta Tagging to Your Blog

Liza Daly
May 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Many publishers use blogs to promote new products and engage customers. Dedicated blog readers will subscribe and receive every post, but the best way to reach a wider audience is still via search engines.

Embedding simple machine-readable code is a key component of the "semantic" Web, in which search engines don't just treat Web pages as a jumble of keywords, but instead can understand their meaning.

Technology firm Adaptive Blue has recently released a scheme for tagging books, movies and other media to enable search engines to label media products appropriately. Because Adaptive Blue's AB Meta is so new, there aren't yet dedicated tools for it. Fortunately, the scheme is very simple and re-uses basic Web tagging. Publishers can use this scheme -- today -- to enrich blogs and product pages.

Here we provide instructions for adding AB Meta content to a WordPress blog. Examples for integrating the format into other blogging software can be found in the description of AB Meta.

Using AB Meta with WordPress

1. Download the HeadMeta plugin
2. Unzip the plug-in and copy the headmeta folder to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Enable the plug-in in the WordPress Plugin Management page (/wp-admin/plugins.php)
4. When writing a new post, look under Advanced Options -> Custom Fields.

The Custom Fields form will allow you to set two items: a key and a value:

1. The key will always be "head_meta".
2. The value will be in the following general format:
   

   name="an AB Meta field" content="the field's value"
   

Here's an example for a book title:

To qualify as AB Meta content, one field is required and should always be added:

name="object.type" content="book"

After that, you will add fields that are specific to your book content. Here are some examples from the Adaptive Blue site for the book The Kite Runner:

name="object.type" content="book"
name="book.title" content="The Kite Runner"
name="book.author" content="Khaled Hosseini"
name="book.isbn" content="1594480001"
name="book.year" content="2004"
name="book.link" content="https://books.com/1594480001.html"
name="book.image" content="https://books.com/1594480001.jpg"
name="book.tags" content="fiction, afghanistan, bestseller"
name="book.description" content="Story of an Afghan immigrant."

For WordPress, in the Custom Fields option, these would all be entered like this:

In the key field: head_meta
In the value field: name="object.type" content="book"

In the key field: head_meta
In the value field name="book.title" content="The Kite Runner"

... and so on, through all of the metadata fields to be included with the blog post.

What advantages are there to using AB Meta?

At the time of this writing, there are no applications that are specifically indexing AB Meta content. However, the scheme is quite simple, both for human and computer readers, and is likely to see widespread adoption. Tagging content with it now means that when these tools become available, you will already have significant inventory indexed. In addition:

1. Many of the fields in AB Meta correspond to values in the Google Book Search API. This should make it trivial for Google to match articles about books to specific entries in Google Books, where customers can preview content before buying.
2. It's likely that tools based on Amazon Web Services will be built on top of AB Meta to allow those tags to generate direct or affiliate links to the Amazon.com book store.
3. Some XML-based workflows already store book metadata in the Dublin Core schema, and AB Meta supports Dublin Core directly.
4. Simpler blog plug-ins that support or even can auto-generate AB Meta are certain to be developed.

So get tagging! In the meantime we'll continue to monitor progress of AB Meta in terms of adoption and tools.

Related Stories:

• Simplifying Semantic Tagging
• Different Approaches to the Semantic Web
• Google Opens Book Search with API