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Tuesday, September 09, 2003 |
xian asks: Should there be a standard way to give credit in a weblog entry?.
A lot of smart people have been thinking about the data model of a weblog entry (going back to the weblog profile for RSS initiative that stalled out and partly led to the Pie process), and particularly what are the likely meanings of the link element, which can be (as originally invisioned) a link from a description to a full item, or (as Blogger's link field and bookmarklets imply) a link to an external resource that the weblog entry comments on, or (as is commonly generated by Movable Type) a permalink for the entry, regardless of whether a summary, excerpt, or complete body text have been packed into the description field.
Those are the three most likely key links in a blog entry, and they are sometimes the same thing, especially when there is no external resource. Including links in an entry body doesn't inherently populate the link feed, although in theory a blog tool could grab the first anchor href, if any, and use that as the default link, if not overriden. Instead, the default seems to be the permalink, with the option - in some tools - over overriding with an external-resource link.
During the RSS 2.0 process, a "b link" module was proposed by Mark Pilgrim, as a kind of "the blog I'm currently reading or recommending" and adopted into the spec by Dave Winer, but it didn't really catch on, being a sort of off-the-cuff vanity item.
There's another kind of link, however, that I think most of us have been overlooking, although its presence in the blog world is nerly ubiquitous, under a numer of different names. What I'm talking back is a link that credits the source of an item. Like many people in the blogosphere, I consider it good netiquette to include a link to the source of an item, particularly when the resource isn't at the time generally available from many sources. Radio, for example, automatically captures that link when you post from its aggregator.
I think this "via link" or "hat tip" should be acknowledged as a well understood, if optional / conditional (only if there is a key source) field in the weblog data model. Not only is it "nice," it would actually make it easier to trace the spread of ideas, a kind of reverse tracking-back.
8:11:58 PM 
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Apple: Reselling iTunes songs 'impractical': An Apple
Computer executive on Monday downplayed recent questions
over the download resale policy of the company's iTunes Music
Store, saying technical if not legal barriers would largely prevent
such transfers from taking place. By Ina Fried and Evan Hansen, CNET
News.com.
Apple's position is that it is impractical, though perhaps
within someone's rights, to sell music purchased online, Peter Lowe,
Apple's director of marketing for applications and services, told CNET
News.com in an interview.
Lowe's comments came after eBay last week pulled an auction seeking to sell
an iTunes download, saying the attempted sale violated the site's listings
policies.
Earlier coverage
Friday, and
Thursday, last week.
1:20:52 PM
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Fascinating news from Publisher's Lunch (sorry: it's long; but I don't see
it linkable space):
BN.com Drops E-Books, Even As Amazon May Be on the Verge of
Looking Further Inside
BN.com has announced to vendors and previous e-book customers that
they will stop selling e-books as of today. The brief e-mail does not offer
any further details, and company officials did not respond to our queries.
At one point BN.com was the pioneer among big e-tailer in offering e-
books, though by informal accounts the continuing shift in favor of the
Palm platform within the modest market that evolved left BN’s operation
on the sidelines. Just weeks ago, according to an unconfirmed account,
Barnes & Noble also sold their Memphis-based print-on-demand facility
to Ingram.
Ironically, the curtailment at BN.com comes just as Amazon may be on
the verge of launching their considerably-expanded "Look Inside V2"
feature," which will allow theoretically allow customers to conduct key
word searches that include the full text of participating books, as
well as allowing deeper browsing of full-text books.
According to an internal Amazon presentation document from this spring
obtained by Lunch, the program at one point carried a September 15
launch date. In its bid to win participation from publishers, Amazon hailed
the feature as "the most significant innovation in books merchandising
since the launch of Amazon.com."
As portrayed at the time in this document (and obviously subject to
change and evolution thereafter), the feature would allow visitors to
search the full-text for participating books, with standard search-engine-
style returns and click-through hyperlinks to specific passages. Browsing
would be limited to a maximum of two consecutive pages in either
direction. In an effort to sooth publisher nervousness, Amazon indicated
that shoppers would be limited to viewing no more than 20 percent of the
pages of a book in any given month (though someone using the feature as
a research tool rather than a purchase tool would not be bothered at all by
such a limitation). Though "significant" by its own declaration, the
Amazon document also reassures that the feature is not "a tool to enable
customers to browse an entire book."
While the spring Amazon document provides an interesting glimpse of
what might be coming soon, most parties involved are extremely tight-
lipped about the process. One source familiar with some of the players
indicates a roster of major publishers all across the spectrum in terms of
participation—one big player in, another definitely out, yet another doing
so on a very limited basis.
Players on the authors’ side of the table are raising objections in
principal, contending that providing anything near full-text would be
asserted as a violation of standard contracts. Concerns also include the
contention that the feature as described could threaten existing licensing
revenue from sources like coursepacks, the Copyright Clearance Center,
and permissions.
On the other hand, Amazon tells publishers that the first version of Look
Inside is a "proven sales driver," with internal customer research
concluding that it’s influential in purchase decisions and introducing
customers to books they would not have purchased otherwise. More
browsable and searchable text exposes book content to more customers,
and encourages more purchases, the logic goes.
In the broader landscape, Amazon is seen as eager to blunt the impact of
the ever-expanding Google. As indicated already, most of us are working
on slightly-informed speculation until Amazon plays their hand—which
may be quite soon. And it does make an interesting counterpoint that BN
is pulling back on content technologies in favor of beefing up operations
like traditional publishing more or less as Amazon presses forward further
with what a destination e-tailer can do.
12:20:38 PM
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BNA Internet Law News reports
RIAA LAUNCHES LAWSUITS AGAINST 261 FILE SWAPPERS
The RIAA sued 261 alleged file swappers yesterday, launching
a legal campaign against ordinary Internet users that could
ultimately result in thousands of additional lawsuits. The
lawsuits mark the first time that copyright laws have been
used on a mass scale to sue individual Internet users.
The same source offers this roundup of coverage:
CNET,
Wired News, one from
The New York Times, as well as this from
the Times. Also, the
LA Times weighed in with a story, as did
The Washington Post cover it.
11:20:44 AM
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I forwarded to my mailing list this post from Declan McCullagh's politech
list,
John Gilmore on spam and NOT obfuscating email
addresses, which reads in part:
Unwanted communications would exist even if every "spammer" was
flayed
and burned at the stake. You should know -- reporters get more unwanted
press releases than anybody.
The only viable solution is for the recipient to filter their incoming
email. It's the only viable solution because only the recipient knows
what they are interested in. The anti-"spam" crowd seems to think
that there is a category of communications that NOBODY is interested
in, and that therefore should be suppressed. That is obviously false
with regard to commercial spam, or the "spammers" would not persist in
sending it, since they wouldn't make any money from it. Since some
people ARE interested in it, it's our job (if we choose to accept it)
to create a cheaper way for senders to reach those people -- cheaper
than sending a copy to all of us as well as the recipients who desire
it. We cannot compel people to stop communicating, unless we break
the basic foundations of our free society. Good luck at finding a
cheaper way; my efforts are going into reducing the cost to recipients
of unwanted communications, rather than the cost to senders.
I think there's one error in reasoning there (the one about spammers
profiting, thus reinforcing their interest in spamming, and counting as
evidence of some recipients' being interested), but the main point is one
that only our tremendous capacity for self-delusion keeps from being just
obvious. At any rate, that's how it
seemed to me
in the context of ''tripe'' on Usenet ten years ago.
11:20:38 AM
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Talk about coming in threes . . . R.I.P., Leni Riefenstahl, Warren Zevon,
and James Rachels.
(And, ever hopeful (or not), these tinyurls meant as back
ups if the other, longerurls, break in transit:
Riefenstahl
Zevon
Rachels .)
10:20:19 AM
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