Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 30 May - 5 June 2005

2005-06-07T00:04:04Z

RSS Ripoff Merchants summary

Well my follow-up post about RSS Ripoff Merchants certainly struck a few raw nerves, including for me. It attracted 55 comments, before I was forced to close them early for being persistantly off-topic. Most of the commenters completely missed the point of the post. For the record, my point was and still is: software that encourages people to use other peoples RSS feeds to auto-populate their websites, which is what SuperFeedSystem and others do, is an unfair use of RSS feeds. That was the only scenario I was talking about. Further, I wrote in the first paragraph of my original post on this topic that "I'm absolutely not talking about fellow bloggers who re-post an occasional post of mine - I'm specifically talking about sites that brazenly re-post everything and are doing it for commercial purposes."

Unfortunately a lot of the commenters refused to address the main issue, as summarised above. Instead most commenters took my post totally out of context - choosing to argue about copyright as it applies to aggregators, search engines, syndication, etc. Nothing to do with my post, which was about a specific scenario (SuperFeedSystem and its ilk). I got quite angry at this during the middle of the comments thread, which eventually led me to close the comments.

Meanwhile SuperFeedSystem and similar products will be laughing all the way to the bank. Why? Because they've seen that only me and a few others are actively concerned about software that encourages people to steal original content and put it on their own websites for profit. If the 55 comments on my second post are any indication, most people seem to believe that original content has little value on the Web. If that's the case, then I think that's a very sad indictment of the Web today. Or maybe it's just a sad indictment on the people who left off-topic and provocative comments. I'd like to think the latter.

Needless to say, I'll continue to fight for the principle that original and quality content has value - no matter if it's on the Web or in a book or published any other way.

Web 2.0 for Teachers

On to less contentious things, Ken Smith of Indiana University wrote a post highlighting how Web 2.0 is extending the expertise of teachers. Ken wrote that "Web 2.0 does not serve as a veil hiding the authority of teachers. It is, instead, much more radical than that."

Steve Lazar left a comment on my blog pointing to this page of Web 2.0 resource for teachers. Entitled 'The Read Write Web in Schools', it can also be subscribed to with RSS. Steve's blog also looks like a fantastic resource for those in the education community who want to find out more about blogging and Web 2.0 tools.

Open Source Radio on Web 2.0

Chris Lydon's new public radio show, Open Source, went live this week. The inaugural show was on Web 2.0. The production and hosting by Chris was very professional, so this is going to be a fantastic radio show to listen to regularly. The discussion of Web 2.0 was a philosophical introduction to the topic, from a blogging and Two-Way Web perspective (as opposed to talking tech about APIs, web services and so forth).

EPIC Returns

An updated version of EPIC has been released by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson. It's a short Web movie about the future of news media on the Internet. The original EPIC, set in the year 2014, revolved around a new Google-Amazon hybrid company called Googlezon and its challenge to old media (represented by The New York Times). Robin Good posted a transcription of the first EPIC, or you can view it here.

The new version of EPIC is set in 2015. It's more of an update than a sequel and the authors say it has "a slightly more optimistic spin."

Techie Post of the Week: Search with RSS output

Niall Kennedy works for Technorati, but his post entitled Gathering and distributing search results as RSS gives decent coverage to most of the main search engines that output results as RSS feeds: Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, PubSub, and MSN or Yahoo! Search. There are others of course, like Blogdigger, but I suppose you can't cover everything. One major search engine notable for its absense is Google - but that's not Niall's oversight, it's just that Google doesn't offer RSS feeds for its searches!

Speaking of RSS search engines, PubSub is one of my favourites - it's a 'future search' engine that delivers results from feeds as they occur, rather than finding past articles and posts. John Battelle chatted with PubSub creator Bob Wyman to find out more about how PubSub works - it's worth a read.

That's a wrap for another week! I don't know about the rest of you, but now I need a lie down and a cup of tea :-)

Comment from Hugo Heden on 2005-06-07

2005-06-07T13:01:30Z

Google doesn't offer RSS feeds for its searches, though is does provide with "feed-by-email" -- http://www.google.com/alerts .. that doesn't really count I guess?

Comment from bowerbird on 2005-06-07

2005-06-07T17:22:22Z

for what it's worth, richard, i found the comments to be on-topic, and your rebuttal to be unconvincing. so the fact that you shut down the conversation looks -- from my perspective -- like a power-play by the losing side, enacted just because it could. which leaves kind of a bad taste in my mouth, one that stems from the largely uni-directional nature of blog "communication" in the first place. i enjoy your site in general, but the marketplace of truth requires free speech. i hope it's ok for me to share my opinion like this. thanks.

-bowerbird

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2005-06-07

2005-06-07T17:33:15Z

It's disappointing to hear that bowerbird, but of course you're entitled to your opinion. I still believe those comments were off-topic, however it's obvious there are general copyright issues with RSS feeds that people want to address. So I'm going to start a new thread, in order to try and nut out some practical solutions.

Comment from Lucas Gonze on 2005-06-07

2005-06-07T18:56:00Z

You're ruling out bloglines with the non-commercial clause. This is obviously not what you intended, which shows how suicidal those non-commercial clauses usually are.

Let's say you made your own license which restricted redistribution to selections made by humans, something like a typical reblog site -- the jerks would just hire people to push a button.

Maybe there's an answer, but I doubt it. You're just going to drive yourself nuts and accomplish nothing if you take this situation personally.

Comments for Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 30 May - 5 June 2005