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| Thursday, August 31, 2006 |
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Suit yourself 
| | I'll have a longer html-ized draft of it up tomorrow morning at Linux Journal. |
Fighting splogerism
| | In Abstractioneer, John Panzer writes Another use for feed licenses: Splogicide. In which he asks, What if someone built a tool to make it easy to find such copy right violators (academics use these tools to find plagarism)? With an accompanying service to aggregate complaints and, when they reach a sufficiently remunerative level, send attack lawyers after sploggers. |
| | Well, by coincidence my colleages here at UCSB's Center for Information Technology and Society are academics with exactly that kind of tool: PAIRwise, for Paper Authorship Integrity Research. While it was developed to track down plagarism, it was also authored with the intention that it could be used for many other purposes. Hey, splogfinding might be one of them. |
| | Aaaaand, as it happens, PAIRwise is open source. And the folks here would love to see other folks run with it in all kinds of constructive directions. Be interesting to see if the hackers amongst ya'll might be up for it. |
| | By the way, it's clear that the majority of new blog posts pinging Weblogs.com are splogs. And all of them leverage writing done elsewhere. |
Publishing 2.0
| | - BoingBoing: "on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year".
- TechCrunch: "$60,000 in revenue every month
- After Mike Arrington's party at August Capital, he "pocketed an extra $50,000" from sponsorships.
- According to Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations at the New York Times, About.com "...is blowing the doors off the business, with second-quarter revenue rising to $19.4 million from $12 million last year-a 63 percent increase that puts About on track for an annual run rate of more than $80 million".
- TimesSelect, the NYTimes closed subscriber-only behind-a-paywall service, "had roughly 513,000 subscribers in June, 190,000 of whom were paying the Web-only rate of $49.95 a year, thus contributing about $9.5 million to the bottom line".
- As for the Times itself, "Amid uninspiring second-quarter results in which the company's revenue and profit were basically flat from the same period a year earlier, Internet revenue soared from $49 million to $66 million".
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| | Nisenholtz admits that some of the site's more forward-leaning features have yet to take off. On the Most Popular page, while the Most E-Mailed feature is, as he puts it, "the big kahuna, a significant driver of interest," Most Blogged and Most Searched are catching on more slowly. Tagging hasn't caught on at all. |
| | And even RSS newsfeeds, which the Times adopted early, are still "a niche," Nisenholtz says. (In June, RSS feeds generated 12.2 million pageviews for the site out of a U.S. total of nearly 295 million.) "RSS is still very techie," he says. "Most people outside the business are totally unaware of it." |
| | How much more (or less) would the Times make if they didn't have that paywall? Just wondering. |
And what are the other ways to fight sploggers?
| | What about other solutions rather than licenses? For example, what about having a link to "I am a victim of spam" or "I am a victim of splogging" with an estimate of the amount of damages incurred. And perhaps something about the culprit. Making it easier for somebody to pursue our cause. Shouldn't that be sufficient in court? or in street justice? Why is it a copyright issue? |
| | First, I agree that we need solutions other than licenses. In fact, I think the best solutions in the long run will be technical rather than legal ones. I also think we're a long way from either being "solutions". The best we can do for now is push together on several fronts to get more people involved in solving the problem rather than just tolerating or complaining about it. |
| | Second, I agree with Andrius (who writes here and here) that it's important to grow and value the public domain, which has been on the legal outs in the U.S. for a long time. At the same time, I think we need better solutions of the sort Eric Raymond (a far more dedicated libertarian than myself) calls "propertarian". Use rights for one's creative works may be one of those. Certainly Hollywood would agree. (And that alone creeps me out.) |
| | Julian Bond would like to see enforcement as a feature on the legal side. I think he'd agree that we would also be served by technical forms of enforcement as well. Meaning that the post you publish only for noncommercial use literally cannot be used for commercial purposes. Technically. Do-able? I dunno. Hell, I'm not even sure that we want that, yet. Because, |
| | Third, I really don't care much whether a splogger uses my writing. I do care that I often can't find the original source of something somebody writes, and a big reason for that is a deficiency in credit-giving. Not only do sploggers throw a mess of false radar images out into the 'sphere, but just as often (in my experience, anyway), folks will just quote a source without attribution or linkage. Yeah, in most cases you can dig around and eventually find the source. But how long will that be the case, as splogging grows out of control? |
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