Information wants to be!

[andrewducker]

Fascination discussion on Metafilter on RSS, republishing and LiveJournal.

Comments

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

"Waah! You read my web page, which entails making a COPY of it in your computer's memory! You're a criminal! I want a pony!"

[andrewducker]

I can see their point that there's a difference between reading their blog on your computer from the RSS feed and wholesale republishing.

But it's a fairly subtle point and very technology dependent.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

I just don't think you can make a distinction between browsing and "wholesale republishing" on the Web. I mean, is it a crime to view a Web page in a different browser than the one the author had in mind? After all, it'll look slightly different. Is it a crime to link to a Web page? After all, you're putting it in a context that the author might not approve of. If you want control over everything, you probably shouldn't be making your work available on a network that was designed with openness as one of the primary ideals.

[interimlover.livejournal.com]

cool, i'm doing a presentation on RSS in a few weeks and this gives some good food for thought. thanks for posting.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I publish a machine readable verson of my weblog and object when people process it?

Fine, then the onus is on the publisher to prevent its use on live journal.

An apache configuration directive generating an 'access denied' for LJ's bot, for example.

If they aren't willing to do that. Who cares.

It's the same stupid whinging I heard about the LJ image feed.