Now this is going to be interesting. Kevin Heller's superlative TechLawAdvisor blog has a story about how Marty Schwimmer (going for three links from here in one week, only one of which is an outright ripoff on my part) has loudly disconnected himself from Bloglines, an aggressive RSS feed aggregator. Marty is annoyed, and rightfully, that what the company is doing amounts to a 21st-century version of the old "framing" conundrum of the '90's. (See here for a scaredy-cat but thorough [natch] treatment.)
Kevin updated and wrote, "more complicated than I thought," linking to an article just a day earlier on Dennis Kennedy's tech law website. He has the same problem although, each man true to form, he writes (and analyzes) a lot more than Marty and doesn't, as far as one can tell, bail out of Bloglines. (I haven't either.)
Well, I'll say it's more complicated. Not only does Dennis Kennedy have a "twin" on Bloglines, he has a twin on DennisKennedy.com, too -- either that or maybe there is a "technological solution" to the question of how he is writing about himself ("Prominent Lawyer Blogger"! yes!) in the third person!
UPDATE: Marty explains that it's not the "framing" -- it's the prospect of his content being repackaged for sale to his own competitors (other trademark law firms). That and what he describes as a "disingenuous" response from the Blogline boys to his inquiry. Evidently, he's getting linked aggressively on this. It will be this week's "inside blogball" story, I think.
2 comments:
Why is BlogLines "aggressive"? Several other aggregators display ads, My Yahoo! being the most blatant example. All one has to do is only provide excerpts in their RSS feeds and the problem is solved.
Playing with HTML and Javascript recently, it is apparent that it is fairly simple to overcome any framing problems.
Of course, all of these slick techniques don't work if you are constrained by blog software.
But I think it only a matter of time that someone comes up with such software that defeats this sort of thing - and can popularize it.
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