I have been thinking about what Cameron Reilly had said to me re the News2.0 opt-out option for blogs listed on AustralianBlogs.com.au – ie. how do we address concerns re copyright abuse?
News2.0 is about showcasing local content. It’s meant to drive traffic back towards the original blog. So it makes sense that we should not be replicating blog post content verbatim. Even if the blogger uses full RSS feeds, I think it would work better if we truncated the blog posts shown on News2.0 – all roads should point back to the original blog post and thus the original blog.
To this end, we have added some code to truncate content after 600 characters. I hope this is enough to whet the appetite of the blog lurker so as to induce a clickthrough to the original blog post.
UPDATE: Just cleaning up some rogue
Hi Jon, (I hope thats the correct name)
Probably a wise choice to truncate to abide by fair-use(whatever that is) until something like itags becomes standard issue and the copyright metadata can be extracted in full and data used where permissable.
Another question is whether you should be stripping image tags from the item content. I see the posts are still displaying images where used. This too is an area that may, sadly, be considered problematic. Especially considering those images aren’t cached on your server and probably shouldn’t be with respect to copyright.
Request; can I have an RSS feed for the site? Cheers.
Hey Craig,
Thanks for feedback. Rorting other peoples’ content is not what I want us to be known for 🙂 I’ll see what I can do with the image tags though my initial reaction is that pictures are a real drawcard for the truncated blog post perhaps one that pushes the lurker into clicking on the blog link? What do you think?
Working on the RSS. Might be the last thing that gets released. Code is so messy as you might have noticed (I think there is a rogue
Loved your blog BTW. Why haven’t you listed it on AustralianBlogs?
Jon
Argh! I can’t add or subtract! 🙂 Your spam prevention lost my comment. 🙁
Briefly, images are a huge drawcard and help break up the text. I think an alternative you could use is to make your spider take a screen capture of the blog the post came from and display that. tailrank.com does this reasonably effectively.
As for my reasons for not adding myself to australianblogs yet, see my blog and why comet aka vox disappointed me.
Keep up the good work,
Craig.
Fair enough. The option to either opt-in or opt-out should be a given I think.
On an RSS note, if anyone knows how to change a full feed into a partial one at the aggregator-end, PLEASE let me know. My clumsy attempts are wreaking havoc in DEV.
Hey Craig,
Cleaned up the code and went with your comment re image copyright as well. Have a look at news2.com.au and let me know what you think.
Thanks for sharing your feedback.
Cheers,
Jon
(…sleeping better)