[IP] more on editors query

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: steven cherry <steven@panix.com>
Date: September 26, 2005 9:28:48 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: [IP] editors query


The short answer is, no, there's no quick abstracting tool.

As to the question of fair use and whole articles, versus snippets,
my own opinion, and not speaking for my employer, is that it is
a fair use. And as a writer, I have to say, I love for my words
to be read - any way they get into people's hands is fine.

That said, when I forward items in our publication that I think would  
be of interest to the list, I usually send a snippet. We
prefer that articles be read at our site, not just for the pageview  
traffic, but because the articles look better, they read better, they  
contain their links to sidebars, and, most importantly, they have any  
corrections or changes or forward links we may have added since  
publication. If it were just the immediate IP readership,
it would be less of a big deal. But IP is archived widely around
the Web.

For those reasons, snippets are usually better. As it turns out, most  
feature stories are written in such a way that while the
first couple of paragraphs don't, as you note, give the right
sense of an article, the first one-sixth or so usually does. In
a Spectrum article, it's usually (not always) everything up to
the first paragraph that has a bold lead-in. Posting those first
paragraphs (it's usually about 10-12 paragraphs, in a full-length
feature story), along with something like [more] or [etc], to
let IP readers know that's not the whole article, might be an
effective good compromise.

 Steven

--
  Steven Cherry, +1 212-419-7566
  Senior Associate Editor
  IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave,  New York, NY 10016
  <s.cherry@ieee.org>  <http://www.spectrum.ieee.org>


On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, David Farber wrote:


> Sometimes I send complete articles to IP. I get occasional  
> complaints from IPers about the use of full copyrighted articles  
> and while I believe it is fair use, I would rather not test the  
> position IF I had an easy way of getting a brief abstract of the  
> web page with the url I could send out.
>
> Does anyone know of any browser (MAC based) that can do that for me. ?
>
> just snipping the beginning does not often give any sense of the  
> article and I just don;'t have the time to compose an abstract.


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