From: Jason Calacanis
[mailto:jason@calacanis.com]
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 5:38 AM
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] Google News
Dave,
The bigger issue is that Google has positioned itself as not being in the
content business since inception. With this move they may not be producing
content, but they are certainly curating it. Couple that with YouTube's
Presidential debate and media companies are going to start scratching their
head I predict. These issues make it particularly hard for a Google sales
person to come into a company like the New York Times (or a smaller publisher)
and say "we're not competitive with you because we don't make content and
Yahoo is competitive with you because they do make content."
Yahoo on the other hand, clearly is in the content business despite what their
executives claim (i.e. their gaming content: http://videogames.yahoo.com/ ). This is
a problem for Yahoo's Publisher Network and their partners because by
partnering with Yahoo's advertising network you're giving a large % of your
revenue to someone who produces content to compete with you. Google could start
facing this issue if they expand this program.
With regard to the scraping of comments, fair use would allow the quoting of
these experts in large part so Google would be much better off if they simple
offered these comments to the public under a Creative Commons, non-commercial
license.
best, j
---------------------
Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
My blog: http://www.calacanis.com
AOL IM/Skype: jasoncalacanis
On 8/9/07, Dave Farber <dave@farber.net> wrote:
From: Frode Hegland [mailto:frode@hyperwords.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 10:22 PM
To: Dave Farber
Subject: Google News
Interesting:
"TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera
makes an interesting observation on the Google News story all over the
blogosphere today.
One thing that bugs
me: they're now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other
aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course
Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news
content."
--