Publishing

Et Tu, Rafe Colburn?

Rafe Colburn has an interesting confession regarding the Web nerd cage match we're having over Google Toolbar and other content-manipulation tools: I have a Firefox extension installed called Adblock. All it does is prevent the browser from downloading resources containing the patterns that I specify. I installed it for one reason, to keep my browser from downloading any content from BlogAds. I make money with BlogAds on two sites, so I could write an impassioned essay about how Colburn is ... (read more)

2005/02/24

Prying Into the Google Crowbar

I'm studying the technical implementation of the Google Toolbar to find a JavaScript technique a Web publisher could use to detect and defeat autolinking. I wouldn't use it on Workbench, but if I were Barnes & Noble or another online bookseller, I wouldn't have much patience for software that adds links to my competitors on my pages. I thought I might be able to compare document.fileSize to the size of the page in document.body.innerHTML.length, but these values don't match and don't change ... (read more)

2005/02/22

Google Wants to Play Tag

I see it as an issue of 'Who owns the content being displayed?' Google does not own the content, and when it uses the content of others to make money, it often will be violating the intellectual property laws. -- Attorney Terence Ross on the Google Toolbar's new autolink feature I can understand the appeal of the argument that anything that exists on your computer is yours to edit, archive, or transform as you see fit. Roger Benningfield sums it up nicely: "My house, my rules." But we don't ... (read more)

2005/02/21

Trying the New Google Crowbar

I'm researching the new Google Toolbar beta, which enables Internet Explorer users to click an AutoLink button that edits Web pages, adding links when it recognizes a book's ISBN number, street address, or package tracking number in the text of a page. Though it's a cool hack, as I said on Jason Levine's weblog, at first glance this seems like overstepping the boundaries of copyright. Robert Scoble voices similar concerns. I fund my Web server in part through the revenue generated by affiliate ... (read more)

2005/02/20

Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution

I had no idea how important Google PageRank was to the business world until I did some PHP/MySQL programming for a local ecommerce retailer. The boss watched search rankings on product-related keywords for the company and its competitors on a daily basis, and you could see the immediate effect on sales of a rank move. Multiply one small St. Augustine company by one million and you have a huge worldwide economy, utterly dependent on the vicissitudes of an algorithm. Google's support for a ... (read more)

2005/01/19

Blogger Payments No Kos for Alarm

A Wall Street Journal story and the invisible backhand of the blogosphere are attempting to make the publishers of Daily Kos and MyDD the liberal versions of Armstrong "No Bribe Left Behind" Williams: Howard Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor's campaign in their online journals, according to a former high-profile Dean aide. There's no comparison between these situations. Jerome ... (read more)

2005/01/14

Kent Brownridge, general manager of Us Weekly parent company Wenner Media, on the breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston: For a celebrity weekly, this is our tsunami. It's a good thing he didn't describe it as "our 9/11." That would be in poor taste. ... (read more)

2005/01/12

I'm a big fan of Salon.Com, but I have to call out a tasteless metaphor by Publisher David Talbot in a story about the survival of his magazine and Slate: I think once the Internet bust got into full swing, it was like being survivors of a tsunami. Everybody was glad they were still there, no matter how they felt about each other before it hit. ... (read more)

2005/01/07

Legendary science fiction author Ursula Le Guin is doing everything she can to dissuade fans of her books from watching the Legend of Earthsea mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel. She's most offended by the decision to change the races of her characters, making most of them white: My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and ... (read more)

2004/12/22

Searching the Web for Copycats

Here's a useful application of the Google API: Copyscape, a free service that can find Web sites plagiarizing your content. The service takes any URL as input, looking for a suspicious number of matching words on other sites. Most hits for Workbench came from sites and aggregators making legitimate use of my RSS feed. Copyscape found several plagiarists of my book Sams Teach Yourself Java 1.1 in 24 Hours, using the first chapter as input. The service might be too fast on the trigger: Another ... (read more)

2004/12/16

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