I was putting the finishing touches on JournURL’s integrated aggregation tools right around the time that Schwimmer began to complain about Bloglines. The result:
* I added robots.txt support, something that (apparently) few aggregators are doing at the moment. I understand the “we’re not spiders” argument, and even agree with it… but if someone wants to go to the effort to explicitly ban my service, I’m not going to argue with them. And unlike an IP block, robots.txt can be implemented by mere mortals like Schwimmer.
* I added an “index,nofollow” meta tag to every page that displays syndicated material. Assuming Google & Co. behave themselves, that should prevent the service from inadvertently stealing search juice from authors.
* I posted a “Good RSS Citizenship” entry in my blog, detailing some ideas for publishers to protect (and empower) themselves. One of the biggies… if you want desktop aggregators to be able to read full content while restricting web aggregators to summaries, then put a summary feed first among your autodisco links, ahead of the full-content version. JournURL snags the first feed you offer, so if it’s summary-only, that’s what we’ll display.
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2 responses to “Does Bloglines violate our copyrights?”
I was putting the finishing touches on JournURL’s integrated aggregation tools right around the time that Schwimmer began to complain about Bloglines. The result:
* I added robots.txt support, something that (apparently) few aggregators are doing at the moment. I understand the “we’re not spiders” argument, and even agree with it… but if someone wants to go to the effort to explicitly ban my service, I’m not going to argue with them. And unlike an IP block, robots.txt can be implemented by mere mortals like Schwimmer.
* I added an “index,nofollow” meta tag to every page that displays syndicated material. Assuming Google & Co. behave themselves, that should prevent the service from inadvertently stealing search juice from authors.
* I posted a “Good RSS Citizenship” entry in my blog, detailing some ideas for publishers to protect (and empower) themselves. One of the biggies… if you want desktop aggregators to be able to read full content while restricting web aggregators to summaries, then put a summary feed first among your autodisco links, ahead of the full-content version. JournURL snags the first feed you offer, so if it’s summary-only, that’s what we’ll display.
Er, that was “noindex,follow”. Duh.