EPC creates clueless tag
Paul Durman in The Sunday Times reports on the launch of a new initiative by the European Publishers Council (EPC) aimed at retaining more control over what content gets published, how it gets published and who makes money from it.
On face value, that sounds pretty good, right? It sounds good, right up to the part where you find out what they're doing:
Many publishers are concerned that the search engines provide unfettered and unpaid access to newspaper articles and other published material.
"This industry-wide initiative positively answers the growing frustration of publishers, who continue to invest heavily in generating content for online dissemination and use," said Gavin O'Reilly, chairman of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), which is spearheading the initiative. I don't get it. Search engines provide links to content not the content itself.
Why on earth would publishers not want search engines to find and index their content and then link everyone to it?
Think about it: They're investing heavily in generating content for online dissemination and use yet they feel that they need to create obstacles for search engines who want to link to them.
Retuters reports it this way:
The pilot program stems from the huge popularity of search engines, which automatically return search results from newspapers, magazines and books, and usually link back to a publication's own Web site for users to read a whole item. Many publishers feel, however, that the search engines are becoming publishers themselves by aggregating, sometimes caching and occasionally creating their own content.
Aggregating? How about the fact that without search engines, their content would never be found.
Caching? Sure, but only the results. Not the content.
And which of the big search engines occasionally creates their own content from publishers? None that I know of. Even Google News only shows the headlines.
Talk about self-destructive behaviour. Newspapers already look like yesterday's news, and now they're fighting the people who are trying to send them traffic.
Perhaps the best part of the story is that the publishers budgeted £310,000 ($583,700) to "seek advice from third-party experts on the creation of the Automated Content Access Protocol." That's half a million to tell big old media that they should fight the search engines.
By the way, I'd love to meet the third-party experts. If you're one of them, drop me a line and we can get a nice dinner and talk about all of this. For the $500K you just took off of these guys, you can pick up the check.
But I digress ...
Some folks, like this blogger points out, suggest that all you really need is a robots.txt file to control how your site gets indexed. "Probably some sites have extremely valuable content and they need a new permission system, that will match their inflated self-importance."
I wonder what Jarvis thinks about this? You out there, Jeff?
The EPC's plan is to develop a software “tag” that will specify conditions under which search engines can use published material, including charges and usage restrictions.
Ahh ... Now I get it. They paid £310K to create the "clueless" tag.
Links: Times Online, Brand Republic, Reuters, EPC, Steve Yelvington blogs the other side of this, WAN Press Release.
Technorati Tags: media, newspapers, EPC, WAN, dinosaurs
Monday, September 25, 2006
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