My very own feud with Engadget
This morning I woke up to an email from Peter Rojas of Engadget:
Our RSS feed is for non-commercial, private use only, we'd appreciate it if you did not republish it on your site.He was talking about this page (since removed) on shrook.com (FYI: Users' own channels accessed via shrook.com aren't visible to the public, only ones I add via the Channel Guide). I mailed back explaining that shrook.com is an online aggregator and not a publication, just like Bloglines, and pointed out that he links to Bloglines from his homepage. His reply:
I'm asking you nicely to remove our RSS feed from your site. We'll be offering an abridged version of the feed soon that you'll be free to use.So I replied again, explaining about the Channel Guide and that the page barely gets viewed by anyone other than Shrook users (who have a legitimate right to see it), and that I wasn't interested in putting a lower quality feed in the Channel Guide. His reply:
Wow, thanks for the incredibly condescending email. Remove our feed immediately.You heard the guy. He doesn't want you or anyone else to read his web site, so please stop it or you'll hurt his feelings.
(PS You'll find Gizmodo and Shiny Shiny in the Gadgets section of the Channel Guide)
Update: To avoid the possibility of Shrook or shrook.com users being blocked from reading Engadget, I've removed the page. You will still be able to read Engadget online if you're a shrook.com user.
-- Graham, April 28th, 2005 6:22 PM.
Answers
You're an incredible jerk, of course you should remove his proprietary feed, if your friends need to see it, they can visit engadget.-- John, April 28th, 2005 7:27 PM.
Yes, Graham should respect Engadget's rights to keep those hits down should Peter so desire. However, John, you need to get a book on diplomacy.-- Bob Roberts, April 28th, 2005 11:57 PM.
hey guys, calm down. what's all this fuss about ? kiss your girlfriend and eat a muffin :)-- stefan, April 29th, 2005 12:00 AM.
I'm sure it has everything to do with Weblogs, Inc. putting Google AdSense into all their feeds. It's a pity.-- Carrick, April 29th, 2005 8:11 PM.
Welcome to the future. RSS feeds licenses are the new frontier of the shit race. While I'm a huge fan of Shrook and Engadget, I'm very disappointed in both of you. Perhaps the two of you could use this opportunity to vent your frustration and anger to start some meaningful debate on the issue. Let me try (very humbly) to give you a hand.There are many challenges facing RSS in the future. A few that concern me most are.
a) how can intermediaries like Bloglines and shrook make money off millions of bloggers feeds to run their excellent businesses and yet we bloggers protect our rights and our ability to make money.
b) Ads in RSS?
c) Non-standard licensing on feeds - this is especially going to become a problem with bloglines and corpro giants like the NY Times and Reuters who are (more so than engadget) going to want full control over their RSS.
d) feed spam - there are already thousands of underhanded feeds which seek to dilute the validity of RSS as a medium for the sake of driving some traffic to their sites or selling a product. Luckily RSS has proven resilient to feed spam do the fact that RSS is inherently subscription based (read "trusted sources")... although feed spam is still sneaking into sources like bloglines, technoratti and other intermediaries like google and yahoo.
With these problems also come opportunities. For example... I've just recently started seeing ads in RSS feeds. As opposed to being annoying and intrusive I think a balance is being struck. Case in point Engadget just started adding simple text based adsense ads to their feed. Contrary to my general distrust of advertising I don't find them intrusive at all. I mean I couldn't tell you what a single one said, but I did notice they were there, and if it makes Engadget money then great. I think it imposes a distributed tax on their readers much larger than it's worth in money but it's their choice and I respect their right to experiment. On the other hand if Engaget starts putting in really annoying blinky ads with graphical crap... well, I'm going to start blocking them or unsubscribe from their feed. Turnabout is fair play. :) ...I wouldn't recommend Shrook do this, but I might even create some Butler type tools myself. ;)
Meanwhile there's huge opportunity in the Bloglines, Shrook, and Technoratti front. There are problems with profiting from others IP, big legal issues in fact, licenses and all that crap, but the benefits of having these intermediaries is HUGE and undeniable. I imagine Shrook, Bloglines and like services bring Engadget huge readership. If these intermediaries can't be allowed to profit in some way shape or form from the aggregation and disinter-mediation of all our IP then what are we but bloggers blogging to ourselves. Without disinter-mediation services, reblogging, and the general mishmash that happens in the blogosphere blogs would have little value.
Interconnectedness is a FUNDAMENTAL KEY to bloggings' success. Of course we all know this, right? I think shrook fairly utilizes Engadget's feed... There are NO ads placed on the Shrook pages, and it is displayed purely as a service to purchasers of the Shrook software. If Engadget has a problem with this then it has a problem with Bloglines. Bloglines makes direct revenue from my content and your content. I'd like to see Engadget opt out of that. A self-boycott, that would do wonders for Engadget's traffic. But, before I get to uppity, lets me recommend that Peter Rojas start a dialogue or perhaps try to map out what he things is and is not improper usage of the engadget feed. (And pointing to some obtuse legal license is NOT the answer!) I haven't read Engadget's license but even if it does mention RSS I doubt it addresses this issue properly.
One last thing, If Engadget still has a problem with it's RSS being displayed I would point out that the technologies exist to at the very least display the page directly off Engadgets server using whatever styles, layout information or even ads. You want something to bitch about? That's not redistribution, it's merely a change of context. The only difference from displaying engadget's feed in a news reader and the shrook website would then become the context. Likewise Engadget can piss all over Shrook by detecting referrer information. You can both piss all over each other all you like, but I remind you one last time where there is strife their is opportunity. So quite bitching and find out what it is.
Signed, some jacka-s!
-- anon, May 6th, 2005 9:39 PM.
At a point in time, when I was trying to evaluate various RSS agregators, I understood there had been contacts between Shrook and PithHelmet, which to me was almost sufficient to register Shrook immediately. Alas it didn't work (last year). Is it fixed now?If you happen to be both
- the first RSS agregator with PithHelmet ad filtering*
- the first RSS agregator which "saved" posts are SpotLight-searchable
Well, you'll just be this: THE FIRST!Hervé
(*) I know, I know, PH may in fact filter only the html pages you show -but, first, it is always that, and it'll be very precious to the large user base from PH on Safari, and second, is this sure? Maybe it also filters RSS?-- Hervé S., May 11th, 2005 1:56 PM.