We had a rather interesting ‘discussion’ this afternoon with Kevin Burton of Tailrank this afternoon after we saw a complete PSFK article republished on his automated site.
Kevin’s response was that he published the article because we publish a full text feed and therefore that meets his terms and conditions. In affect, he told us that it was our fault that his site was publishing our full content.
We don’t ‘offer’ a full text feed for PSFK or IF! actually (so we suppose a bot went and found the hidden one), but that’s beside the point. Kevin’s Tailrank system republished a complete article of PSFK and sold advertising space beside it – i.e. he made money out of our time and effort. We received nothing for that – not even traffic.
Even if we do publish a full text feed – does that mean that someone can put that up on their site for public consumption?
Now, I see the irony of an aggregator complaining about another aggregator – but we believe that our excepts and extracts of others’ content falls within fair use – and that we are actually encouraging traffic to the original content. Tailrank just republishes because it has the data. It’s not a healthy development in online media when one online publisher steals the content from another and sees no wrong.
Kevin and others: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Please consider fair use.
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Dude, I read your blog for its content on consumer affairs but when you constantly banter on about who’s using your content word for word is just annoying and especially for readers – your site is all over the place – why dont you shut up and focus on what you should be doing – writing about trends
August 6th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
Erm,
1) We are writing about trends. We’re writing about how online media behaves.
2) No, one pays to read this site – so quite frankly, we can write about anything want –
3) or in fact, we could take your suggestion and “shut up” and go and do something more financially rewarding instead.
I’m sorry if that all feels a bit snarky but we put a bit of time and effort into this. We care about psfk.
August 6th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
I believe there are two types of people in online media.
Digital Aggregators and Digital Creators.
Aggregators think it’s great to spread content and don’t care about anything else but maybe gaining a leg up, cash or otherwise by spreading ‘free media’. Creators are all about the craft, the special touch, the find, the make.
My guess is an Aggregator like the fella you argued with is the same kind of person that thinks SEO is cool.
SEO, in my mind, is the anti-content. SEO breaks the rules of ‘content is king’ and instead makes ‘math king’.
I have a friend that does SEO for a living, it’s like we live in a different online-world. I expect sites to gain ranking by reciprocal linking for the content. He helps sites gain ranking with math, money, and sometimes even spam.
I don’t think anyone is ‘wrong’ here, it’s just too early to tell what the internet might become. I’d like to hope it’s about content creation and creativity– and republishing someone elses content is ‘against the rules of our digital-universe’– but unfortunately it’s too soon to tell.
Good on you for being what I like to call a ‘responsible’ member of the online community.
August 6th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
PSFK is aggregation but with independent voices and views in that mix. Most of our time is spent sourcing these ‘trends’ and offering them up here in our own way – for someone just to repost our words in full with no other context is lazy and wrong.
Maybe we should explore a ‘Creative Commons’ license on here?
In the meantime, let’s track this dude down and give him numerous chinese burns!!!
August 7th, 2006 at 3:07 am