February 8, 2005

Does Bloglines violate our copyrights?

I've been waiting for someone to formally complain about the way bloglines reproduces full text feeds in a web format: InformationWeek > Weblogs > The Weblog Question > January 31, 2005

Posted by xian at February 8, 2005 10:25 AM

I was putting the finishing touches on JournURL's integrated aggregation tools right around the time that Schwimmer began to complain about Bloglines. The result:

* I added robots.txt support, something that (apparently) few aggregators are doing at the moment. I understand the "we're not spiders" argument, and even agree with it... but if someone wants to go to the effort to explicitly ban my service, I'm not going to argue with them. And unlike an IP block, robots.txt can be implemented by mere mortals like Schwimmer.

* I added an "index,nofollow" meta tag to every page that displays syndicated material. Assuming Google & Co. behave themselves, that should prevent the service from inadvertently stealing search juice from authors.

* I posted a "Good RSS Citizenship" entry in my blog, detailing some ideas for publishers to protect (and empower) themselves. One of the biggies... if you want desktop aggregators to be able to read full content while restricting web aggregators to summaries, then put a summary feed first among your autodisco links, ahead of the full-content version. JournURL snags the first feed you offer, so if it's summary-only, that's what we'll display.

Posted by: Roger Benningfield at February 8, 2005 10:33 PM

Er, that was "noindex,follow". Duh.

Posted by: Roger Benningfield at February 9, 2005 8:51 AM

Trackbacks

Trackback for this post:
http://mediajunkie.com/jack/pinger.cgi/5933 Further comment
Other incoming links (via Technorati)
Post a comment









Remember personal info?






Hosted by Mediajunkie.

Sponsors
On this day in 2003
Bloggers fact-check Howard Coble's ass: Check out the excellent work at Is That Legal? covering the Howard Coble story. Coble, who you may recall was opposed for reelection by blogger Tara Sue Grubb recently stated that the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II was done for their own good. This is the man in... (Politics)
The Dead live: Well, it looks like the remaining members of the Grateful Dead have shucked the played-out "Other Ones" monicker and have decided to call their new band simply "The Dead." In doing so they've managed to split hairs, technically leaving the official name of the Jerry-era band retired but resurrecting a name... (Miscellany)
Putting deficits in perspective: Frank Boosman of Pseudorandom felt that the "record deficit" chart I reprinted from Reuters earlier this week was misleading, in that it did not put the deficit figures into context as a percentage of GDP (which most economists feel is a more meaningful way of measuring deficits than in terms of... (Salon Bloggers)
It's like watching grass grow: Scot Hacker points to this fella's Daily Photo Project, consisting of a daily picture of his own face with roughly the same expression. Over time you see his hair grow in between haircuts. Cool idea, especially if he can keep it up. He's been doing it for five years already! As... (Weblog Concepts)