Content scraping is how a lot of blogs have made their name, but as the downturn bites and newspapers look for digital revenues, taking other people's work content is becoming a contentious issue.In most cases when people talk about content scraping they are talking about the natural filtering that blogs big and small do. It's what made the blogosphere great. You know how it works, a blog publishes a small excerpt and link to the original article. In doing this blogs like the Huffington Post and New York business blog Silicon Alley Insider have always argued they pick the best of the web and highlight it to their readers.
Usually it is in the form of a short post or it might be used as the basis for a much longer piece. In return the newspaper concerned gets a link back to the original article, which drives traffic and (so went the earlier theory) revenues.It's been the status quo, but maybe not for much longer. A piece in the New York Times points the finger at Silicon Alley Insider. In February it "quoted" a quarter of a column by Peggy Noonan's from the Wall Street Journal with a line a the end: "We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you".The "in advance" bit is interesting as publishers don't explicitly give permission, but then they don't expect you to brazenly reprint large chunks either.Prior to the downturn, the excerpt and link (EAL) model has been fine'ish, but lately, as we've all noticed, a few flies have appeared in the once pristine ointment. One problem is that this traffic has really not turned out to be worth as much as many digital publishers (or anyone else for that matter) hoped. You can guess what's started to happen. As publishers fighting for digital revenues, to recoup/fund their digital ventures, they look around and see successful blogs making a business out of their investments. That could irk.It becomes even more of a problem if larger and larger chunks of content are taken and it is the blog post that ends up getting the traffic rather than the original article, which usually takes more time, effort and money to produce. I've seen this happen quite recently to a piece of content that appeared on Brand Republic. That content did well, but the blog talking about it became the centre of the debate. For the record - Silicon Alley Insider published 350 words from the original WSJ piece. That is a lot of "free content".Alley Insider itself, according to its editor in chief, Henry Blodget, operates under a digital golden rule: "To excerpt others the way we want to be excerpted ourselves". Really? Would you like people to take that much of your content? Thanks, I'll get right on it (this is a joke, please hold your lawyers back).There's the added sting that if you search for the original article on Google, good bloggers like the Huffington Post can ensure their post appears higher than the original. Part of this is because Google likes blogs and there are very easy to optimise in terms of SEO. And it is also because bloggers learn all the SEO techniques - as you would.The New York Times piece suggests that because of this some newspaper executives are starting to feel aggrieved as some of the major blogs are taking liberties with their work and increasingly scraping larger piece of content.One thing it could lead to is more copyright infringement cases and lawsuits. The next time Silicon Alley Insider reprints a large extract a little thank you note might not cut it.This all links back to issue of charging and how newspapers make money out of their content. No one seems to have the answer, but how content is used by others will have to play a role in that debate. Not quite sure how. Huffington put it this way to the NY Times:"We want to both drive traffic to ourselves and drive traffic to others. Adding: "We are at the beginning of developing the rules of the road online", she said the site's editors were "constantly talking" about appropriate excerpting conduct.
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If it was illegal to pass comment on the endeavours of others you would have nothing to blog about Gordon!
It isn't the passing comment on others, but reproducing large chunks of their work to do so...
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Gordon Macmillan
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Last login: 24 Nov 2009
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