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the problem with scoble's linkblogWhile I enjoy perusing Scoble's linkblog when I have time (there's pointers to a ton of interesting stuff in there) I have not been so thrilled about his full-republishing technique. In my opinion, the question who exactly created the content is going to be slightly confusing for someone arriving there from a search engine (this in particular for people that don't yet know what blogs are, much less linkblogs). Even if it was obvious though, the fact that he is republishing articles/posts wholesale without explicit permission means that a reader that would otherwise end up in my blog suddenly has no reason to do so. I have avoided commenting publicly on this, waiting to see if it changed, but it hasn't. For example, check out his reposting of my take on AJAX. It's a long post (something relatively common for me) and by the time you scroll down to the second paragraph, you have forgotten that URL at the top. Many people will just get to the end, and move on to the next linkblog post. Republishing content wholesale without permission is a bad idea. And a linkblog is supposed to be made of links, not full posts. Robert, I suggest you simply post links and titles, rather than full posts---at most, a 50-word snippet or comment would do (similar to what Kottke does for his linkblog posts). If you think that's unreasonable, I'd ask you to remove any posts of mine that you may have republished over there and to avoid republishing other posts in the future. Thanks. :) Categories: soft.dev, technologyPosted by diego on March 20 2005 at 6:09 AM | TrackBack (1) Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).
I can't remove past posts, but I won't link to you anymore in the future. See my blog for an explanation. Posted by: Robert Scoble at March 20, 2005 12:26 PMDiego: Could you do those of us working on web-based aggregators a favor and move your full content into content:encoded and put a snippet of your choosing in description? I'm a well-meaning guy, so if one of my users subscribes to your feed, I want to do something appropriate with it. Rather than try to read minds or make guesses, the easiest thing is for publishers to give me what they want me to have... if you give me a snipped rss:description or an atom:summary, that's what I'll default to using. It won't help Scoble due to the nature of his workflow, but it'll really help in other circumstances. Posted by: Roger Benningfield at March 20, 2005 1:07 PMRobert: I remember that in the past you have advocated for full posts, and that you usually only subscribe to feeds with full posts, because you don't want to have to open up new browser windows. This sounds reasonable to me. However, you're also saying that by reading a weblog you reserve the right to republish wholesale whatever you read (which is full posts) because of the tool you're using (Which, as I noted in your comments here http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/03/20.html#a9693 does support excerpts). This sounds a bit extreme to me, but of course you can do what feel is right. Sorry to lose you as a reader if that's your choice. (As an aside: not sure what you mean by "I can't remove past posts." Wordpress has a post-delete option.) Roger: the reason I wasn't using content-encoded was just to keep using only basic RSS 2. It maybe time to switch to atom though, and use the summary -- thanks for the feedback. Posted by: Diego at March 20, 2005 2:10 PMI don't delete past things. Sorry. Yes, it's a messy world out there. I won't read you if you don't have full text too. The thing is, if you want to be part of this community you've gotta stop worrying so much. My stuff is getting reblogged all over the place. Give and you'll get back. My linkblog is an advertisement for how smart you are. If you're not there, well, that's OK. Posted by: Robert Scoble at March 20, 2005 2:59 PM"My linkblog is an advertisement for how smart you are. If you're not there, well, that's OK." heh. arrogance indeed. Posted by: james at March 21, 2005 8:31 AMHi Diego. If your goal is more traffic to your site, I think being quoted in full by Robert Scoble will create more traffic than not being quoted at all. I would bet a few bob that being quoted in full creates more interest than an extract. When I was linked by him from his linkblog, there was an obvious spike in traffic. I think its partly about whether you believe in golden geese or just golden eggs. If I read a great post by someone, directly or indirectly, I want to go the source to see that I get more. I believe in the goose. Maybe you're worrying too much about eggs. Er, does that make sense? Posted by: Johnnie Moore at March 21, 2005 10:17 AMNot an unreasonable request if more interestingly from an academic standpoint illustrating the need to respect one's copyrights while cross posting and/or indexing. Robert I think you gave up too easily. There's a void here which could be filled say if one had the resources of a 40,000 person software development company at their disposal. Some solutions which my neurons have fired often enough to remember are numbered here. 1. The equivalent of the robots.txt file. /* Post a comment
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