Steady on there we don’t want you choking on all those hats!

The point I was trying to make was that any site can easily start off as non-commercial and build up it’s reputation using other peoples content. There are no assurances that a site won’t suddenly start becoming commercial.

The way I see it is that people are annoyed at something.ie because

A. they are using other peoples content without asking
B. They are an obvious commercial enterprise

As Brian pointed out Politics in Ireland also don’t ask people if they can aggregate content so both are guilty of “A” (I understand about the way they link back also gets peoples goat but the underlying perceived infringement of trust/copyright/manners etc (delete according to preferred grievance) is the same)

Now “B” is a harder one to judge. Something.ie is a startup company with an Idea trying to build itself up. Is it the new facebook? Let’s wait and see. It’s got advertisements therefore it’s commercial.
Is Politics in Ireland commercial?
It doesn’t have google ads so it’s not making money that way. The point I was making above is that you don’t need to put ads on your site to be a commercial operation. You could be using your aggregator as an example in order to sell the underlying technology, you could be using it as a platform for personal advancement e.g. “I’m so and so you might know me form the very popular site xyz” Therefore there would be commercial gain from the site. So for this argument you’re commercial (unless expressly registered as a charity or non profit organisation)

While I’m not saying that the people behind politics in Ireland are like this, I’m just continuing with the counter example site previously provided here. I’m sure there are plenty more sites that can be used as examples. What I am saying is that just because they don’t have ads on the site doesn’t mean they’re not profiting from your content the way something.ie is.

I personally am not one for jumping on a soapbox and calling people thieves just because one thinks one has a grievance, especially not when one could equally be accused of being a thief in the same way.

Hacksville were obviously not going to get away with what they were doing. Republishing stuff you have to pay for is a definite no no and beside the Irish Times will have a team of lawyers with which to kick your arse. Judging by the speed at which hacksville was taken down from Wordpress it looks like the Irish Times layers are regular readers of yours Bock.

Sorry Bock for usurping your soapbox. Once I start I don’t seem to be able to stop. I must put this up on my own blog (I’m new to this blogging lark so have as yet my blog is quite bare). I wouldn’t be so rude as to whore my own blog here anyway.

Anyway sorry again Bock and If I see you in Toms over the weekend I’ll buy you a pint.

There’s a list of related posts at the bottom.

P.S. god bless that edit post plugin, I had somehow placed this reply to the wrong post :-)

The rights and wrongs of aggregating RSS feeds is a tricky issue. I suppose if you don’t want your content aggregated fully then don’t put the full post in the RSS feed. I know I am a regular reader of some sites through an RSS reader and rarely click on the site, so the site owner is being denied clicks.

By the way I’m in no way associated with something.ie.

PS customise Google is a great ad on for firefox for blocking annoying things like google ads and google analytics.

PPS Does anybody know what happened to that hacksville fellow. As mentioned above he’s gone off the web?

And that was the nub of the problem. Politics in Ireland does what it says on the tin. I’d say most bloggers are sick to the back teeth of aggs pinging back to their posts. Pingbacks should operate as a tool for widening one’s reading on a subject, that’s certainly how Bock does it. Most aggs do it to get some traffic from popular blogs in the hope they’ll get ad clicks for pages with no original content. Frustrating for readers, frustrating for bloggers. We might be churning out our stuff for free but this doesn’t give carte blanche for others to make money off it.
You might have been surprised at the reactions Brian, but a distinction was very quickly made between what you were doing and what PIIre. does and you now accept that yourself. I think you underestimated the annoyance aggs cause bloggers and you may have bore the brunt of that, but at least you’re being reasonable now, even if you did jump in with two feet initially.
Good luck.

I didn’t edit out your replies. They were were stopped by the Akismet spam filter for some reason. I don’t know why.

Anyway, thanks for responding. Maybe people will come back with their reactions to what you said.

I don’t see my reply to your last question. Perhaps my reply was a little long. If a shorter response is what you’re after then the answer is,

yes, of course…we have already deleted several posts and are continuing to look for others. We’ve pulled the feed from politicsinireland too.

Personally I was surprised when we got the first complaint. From my perspective we were helping drive traffic to them, increasing their link popularity,etc. We never attempted to for one minute to pretend the content was ours.
That said, 2 main points have been made as to why people were annoyed with us. Firstly, the fact that were running google ads alongside their content and secondly the fact that the title of the story did not take you to their site but instead you had to click the link at the end where it said ‘Original Post By …’

What we are about is trying to enable people to create their own communities, group blogs, event sites, social networks, whatever. A big part of that is aggregating the content. We enable people to use us as their blog host (for free) and that makes it easy for people to pull content together into the various different hubs.
For instance, an enviromental group in west cork can have their posts dropped into hubs for Bandon, Clonakilty, etc. but also into enviromental or political hubs, and so on.

This works perfectly for people that have their blogs on something.ie. The problem is that not everyone has their blog on something.ie.

Everyone we talked to loved the idea that they could drop their posts into different hubs, etc.

Niavely, we assumed that those blogging outside of something.ie would be happy to see their content get syndicated, so long as we linked through to them for the full story.
I still feel that getting upset about having your content syndicated is like getting upset because google has spidered your blog and displays you in their search results.

So, with all that in mind, the answer to your question is ‘of course we will’
We have already removed dozens of posts and will continue to do so until we have deleted them all.
We have also stopped taking feeds from politicsinireland.com which was the feed that seemed to cause the most upset.

We’ve also got some ideas on how to enable bloggers to plant their posts into hubs on something.ie regardless of where they blog and hope to start on those in the coming weeks.

We hope that Irish bloggers will use something.ie so clearly we don’t want to piss anyone off, but at the same time it was hard for us to stand back and let someone who had ‘aggregated’ our content accuse us of thieving theirs.

At this stage I think I’ve said enough, tomorrow we’ll change the home page of something.ie and move on and hopefully put this sorry incident behind us.

Finally Bock, thanks for facilitating some of this debate on your blog…