This week: RSS Ripoff Merchants summary, Web 2.0 for teachers, Open Source
Radio talks about Web 2.0, EPIC II, search engines with RSS output.
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 fewothers 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 🙂
