As the war of words ramps up between Google and some news publishers, the latest spin seems to be how worthless the traffic is that Google sends. In reality, the traffic probably does have value, but the newspapers are likely doing a terrible job of monetizing it.

I'll give some examples in a minute, but how about an imaginary story to illustrate the problem?

Let's say a newspaper executive opens a store. They put some story headlines up in their shop window.

Now one of those old fashioned newskids comes along. You know, the type that you'd see in movies selling papers on the street. Let's call the kid Google.

Google reads the headlines and then scampers off down the street, shouting out to people things like Senate's debating health care! or 1 out of 4 homeowners are in the red!

Some of these people are interested. They ask this Google kid for more information, and Google sends them back to the news store.

At the store, the news exec owner greets visitors by asking them what the hell they want. Perplexed, they visitors say they heard about these stories and wanted to know more. The exec shouts at them. Get the hell out of my store, you freeloader! This is for members-only. We don't need riff-raff like you in here.

That's a hell of a way to run a business, don't you think? But it's pretty much how News Corporation execs seem to view the world. Consider what News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller said earlier this month:

The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.

Today, we got similar remarks from James Moroney, executive vice president of A.H. Belo, which publishes the Dallas Morning News and other papers:

This is traffic that's not being monetized to any great degree, Moroney said. It's akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.

Let's be clear about one reason why these statements are coming out. This is round two against Google. In round one, some publishers said Google steals our content. Google's response was that it sends them millions of visitors for free. So in round two, it's time to make out like those visitors aren't worth much. That's especially important if you're an executive who, after floating the idea of dropping Google, comes under attack as stupidly cutting your own throat.

Me, I see visitors as opportunities. This is the internet, where you can tell far more about a visitor to your web site than you can in print. You can tell:

• They're visiting for the first time or on a repeat basis
• They came from Google
• They came from a specific page, or using specific search terms
• The geographic area they're located in

And the visitor who buys your paper printed on a dead tree out of a newsstand? You can tell you sold a copy. And that's it. That regular subscriber? You know they live in a particular area, maybe some demographic info, but you can't custom your dead tree version in any way to target for that.

Can you imagine what would happen if the Wall Street Journal did a one time promotion where for a day, they gave away 1 million copies of their paper? Since there's a real cost to doing so, don't you think they'd figure out a way to make that promotion count? They'd sell special ads? They'd have a super attractive subscription offer?

But on the internet, where they're not paying anything for all that traffic flowing from Google, there just doesn't seem to be any effort. Millions of people are just written off as worthless. If they're watching The Simpsons on Murdoch's Fox TV network, they're valuable (see Free Isn't A Four-Letter Word Offline, So Why Does The Media Hate It Online?). Put the exact same people on the internet, and suddenly they're net neaderthals.

The problem isn't with the people. They didn't suddenly change when sitting in front of a computer keyboard. They don't suddenly have less money. They aren't suddenly less attractive marketing prospects. The problem is with how you're targeting them.

Remember what Miller said? That most of these visitors read a story once and then leave? Well, clearly the WSJ has some analytics running to understand that. Someone, somewhere has churned a report to arm Miller with that information. But that same data can be used to target those visitors better.

Time for a real life example. Today, at lunch, in the hard copy of the Wall Street Journal that I pay $100 per year for, I read a story bout how 1 in 4 US homeowners are underwater or owing more than their homes are worth.

I guess I have at least $100 per year in value to the Wall Street Journal, since I'm a subscriber. But that's gross revenue. Someone's being paid to deliver the hard copy to my door. There are print costs involved with producing it. I doubt the $100 I pay per year covers all that. But the WSJ also convinces advertisers that I'm somehow valuable to them, which is why they pay to place quality ads in the WSJ like this in front of me:

Now that same story is currently being featured on Google. The minute I click from Google to read it, I'm transformed. My $100 per year value is lost. Instead, I become one of those people who Miller says that he doesn't make any money from.

Well, let's see what I get:

That's the beginning of the story. It is EXACTLY the same thing I see if I read this story by clicking through to it from a link on the WSJ's home page (they've made it free to anyone from there). It's also the same thing I see when I'm logged in using my paid account.

Why is the WSJ treating the one-time / first-time visitor the same way as a regular reader? See those two big arrows I've drawn pointing into the story? I'm pointing out that one of the top goals the WSJ would have for first time visitors is to get them to take that 2 week free offer to subscribe or to take one of the free stay connected via email or RSS options. And yet, these things are shoved off to the top and side of the page.

Place them in front of the reader! At worst, you lose nothing. But more likely, you've slightly interrupted one of those freeloaders in the same way you interrupt them when they watch News Corp TV shows and get commercials. And more of them will convert. They may buy more subscriptions, or they may register so you can do outreach marketing to them.

Meanwhile, money IS being made, even off the supposed freeloaders. There's a big ad sitting there off to the site, plus another one right above. Oh, there's too much ad inventory? Then find a way to convince your advertisers to buy more ads or pay more for them, which probably means showing that your ads perform well. And if they're not performing well, fix your problem. Why aren't they?

This is an article about mortgage owners being underwater. Can we assume some of the readers are attracted to it because they may want help with their mortgages? Are there no companies that offer this to type of service? Are there no ad execs who could figure out how to reach them?

Instead, I get served with an ad from Zurich about how to buy the right insurance for my business. Seriously? That's the ad you show me? This is targeting? Roll out one of those Get a mortgage for below 5% ads that I see offline everywhere.

Even better, here's another ad that also shows for this article:

Yeah, in an article about how people can't afford their homes, you show me an ad about buying an iconic residential masterpiece in Boca Raton. And when I don't click on that, because it has nothing to do with my interests, you call me a freeloader.

Your loss, I think. I've got money to spend. Plenty of your visitors do. You're just not figuring out how to get it from me.

That visitor from Google? Show them a completely different experience, if you want. Article and ad, perhaps embedded within the content (labeled as ads, but inline, rather than off to the side). Please, go hire someone like Jeremy Shoemaker or Jennifer Slegg, both of whom live and breathe how to make as much money out of visitors as possible.

Do something. Anything. Please. Survive. But there's one thing you shouldn't do. Blame others for sending you visitors and not figuring out how to make money off of them.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as "flash trading," where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders and can rapidly buy and sell in ways that are argued to influence the market unfairly - thus discouraging mere mortals from participating.

Many bleeding-edge trends in the consumer web play out writ large in financial markets; as all of us look at the growing prominence of real-time information on the web, the debate over flash stock trading raises issues worth considering outside the stock markets as well.

Sponsor

If the real time web at large grows up open and democratic, then we're likely to see innovation, understanding and growth. If it's priced out of reach to all but marketing and state interests, then an experience analogous to that of small-time stock traders today could become what the web at large looks like.

It's easy for technologists to say that this is progress and rejecting the advantages technology brings would demand a return to time before the abacus. It's not so easy to explain why we have to take an all-or-nothing approach to judging technologies and their implications - why not look at them one at a time and evaluate them intelligently?

Here's how the introduction of real time information is being debated regarding financial markets, followed by some thoughts about the analogous transformation going on around the web.

This isn't just a story about robot stock traders and the SEC; it's also a story about Twitter, Facebook and the Pushbutton Web.

Robots in Financial Markets

Last month the New York Times' Charles Duhigg wrote a high-profile story about the practice of high frequency trading, including this juicy description of the practice:

Powerful algorithms -- "algos," in industry parlance -- execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits -- and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.

Rich Miller, writing at Data Center Knowledge, a blog that tracks the powerful computers that high frequency traders (among many other industries) use, called the article one-sided and inconsiderate of the argument that "this activity provides liquidity to execute trades that would otherwise not be possible, making the market more efficient." He also said the press was widening the debate over the practice by bringing it into the mainstream.

Now U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) has sent a letter to the SEC this week, calling for action to be taken against the practice of flash trading in particular, the act of selling for a fee access to trading information milliseconds before it is otherwise available. He argues that the practice "creates a two-tiered system where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment, depriving others of a fair price for their transactions. If allowed to continue, these practices will undermine the confidence of ordinary investors, and drive them away from our capital markets."

Schumer focuses on the early access to information, but always in the context of the computer-driven trading that occurs based on it.

Trader John Hempton writes that critics over-estimate the financial impact of flash traded stock, needlessly complicating a situation that he describes with the following, fascinating, story:

We trade electronically at our fund. We were recently trading in a stock with a large spread. I have changed the numbers so as not to identify the stock - but the ratios are about right. The bid was about 129.50, offer was about 131.50. We did not want to cross the spread - so when we bid for the stock we bid $129.55. Within a second a computer (possibly at our own broker but it makes no difference which broker) bid $129.60 for a few hundred shares. We fiddled for a while changing our bid and watching the bot change theirs. We would have loved to think we were frustrating the computer - but alas it was just a machine - and we were people up late at night.

Actually obtaining the stock required that we paid up - and when we did so it was probably a computer that sold the stock to us.

...It is always there - even when buying defaulted debt that trades once per month. We simply ALWAYS find the bot.

What About Real-time Robots on the Web?

Could the real time web give some people such an unfair advantage over everyone else that non-early adopters of new technologies or people outside of marketing firms could be left out in the cold? Presuming we're talking about important, actionable information online and not just real-time chat and fun - it's possible. The question is: will the most important parts of the real time web be open and democratized, or proprietary and shared only with those who can pay a high price for access? That question hasn't been answered yet.

If you were among the people who purchased the new Breaking News Online (BNO) iPhone app (released an eternity ago, yesterday!) then today you probably found out about the two US journalists being freed from North Korea and the shooting in Pennsylvania at least 45 minutes before almost anyone else did. (CNN posted a link to local PA news 45 minutes after the BNO network published.) That notification system costs $1.99 to purchase and $1 per month to stay subscribed.

If you've visited Yahoo's social-bookmarking turned real-time news service Delicious since this morning, you've seen that hot news links are now found not just by vote counting, but with a new method augmented by tracking the open, rapid conversations on Twitter.

These are innovations built out of elbow grease and publicly available feeds of data. Yahoo might be, but the scrappy guys at Breaking News Online definitely aren't, using software something like IBM's new stream processing software, for which it will charge "at least" hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No, this real-time public web is very low cost and increasingly both open sourced and decentralized. It's akin to what Anil Dash calls the pushbutton web.

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.

As long as it's open and low cost, real time information on the web should be as democratic and fair as computer use is. It's not perfect, but it's no longer the David and Goliath-on-steroids fight that critics of high frequency stock trading say that market has become because of real time stock data.

The Risk: Facebook

The real time web is a shimmering mass of conversation and data, but there's no guarantee that it's going to stay open, free and democratic forever. Already, in fact, there's no bigger river of the real time social web than Facebook. Facebook is simply huge, it holds huge sums of information and so far it allows aggregate access to no one. As far as we know.

If Facebook, or some other equally important site of the real time web, began offering access to its data but pricing mere mortals out of that market - then we could have a situation where individual software developers and social scientists were like grandpa reading the stock pages in the newspaper and huge marketing firms and government agencies had the kind of advantage that high frequency traders are alleged to have in financial markets.

Anil Dash puts it this way:

Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.

In addition to development concerns, there are also analysis concerns. If stock trading equals liquidity and knowledge is the new currency, then open access to aggregate data could be the equivalent of high-powered stock-trading tools for all instead of for just the already-richest few.

Some research has already been performed on the connection between communication on social networks and real-world events. The Information and Language Processing Systems Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, for example, correlated mood messages on LiveJournal closely with world events. ("Mass increase in the level of worriedness around major weather phenomena, such as hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 - Excitedness around global media and culture events, such as the release of a new Harry Potter book on July 15, 2005 - Mass increase in the level of distress and sadness after terror attacks, as witnessed by the response to the London bombings on July 7, 2005.")

Analysis of real time mass communication could lead to a world of innovation and understanding - if that communication is an open fire hose of data and not shared only with deep pocketed commercial partners.

Everything is Complicated, Some Can Afford to Ponder It

Is high frequency, low latency, computer executed, "flash" trading unfair? It must feel that way to individual and small investors who can't afford killer number-crunching robots - but it's also pretty awesome technology and is said to provide liquidity that the markets depend on.

Could the real time consumer web be made undemocratic by being priced out of reach for edge-case developers and social scientists outside of government and the corporate world? That could happen.

As we speak, though, there's a lot of innovation going on in the real time web that's open, based on standards and available to all of us. Let's hope it stays that way

In the past, I've had my fair share of run ins with dress code culture. When I was a sophomore in high school, Duncanville High School, the school I was attending, implemented a dress code that had me expelled and sent to The Summit Education Center for delinquent youth on several occasions (I was in there for wearing shorts to school, the guy next to me threw a computer at a teacher's head and almost killer hergo figure).

But, I managed to graduate from high school and as I moved into college life, I took comfort in the fact that I would never again have to succumb to a mandatory dress code. That is, until I started working for Equity Residential, my sophomore year in college. While I have adopted a somewhat hipster, laid-back look in recent years, back then, I was very much dressed as a bonafide professional. Freshly pressed Express shirts. Hundred dollar ties. Hugo Boss slacks. Kenneth Cole shoes. Head to toe, I was the image of success and my style of dress made me feel confident. Confidence is what sell, not clothing.

Around a year into my sales and marketing position with Equity Residential, though, they decided to implement a corporate-wide dress code. But, unlike most dress codes, where a color scheme is submitted that employees must adhere to, Equity Residential decided that they would force all employees to wear identical, mass-produced, cheap and, many of the garments, downright hideous clothing that they picked out for us. Now, my hundred dollar ties were being replaced with an ill-fitting, salmon, polyester knit shirt that made me want to cut myself every time I caught a glimpse of them in the mirror.

In an attempt at professionalism, I sent the following letter to my district manager as a response to the Equity Residential dress code policy:

Equity Residential's Outward Display of Confidence and Professionalism'

A uniform is a potent symbol of corporate identity and, as such, companies spend considerable time, money and effort in an attempt to ensure their staff project the right look. Equity Residential (EQR) takes great pride in the caliber of its properties, customer service and staff and has put into place many excellent systems to ensure that level of quality is upheld. Last year's Equity Residential Management Excellence Series states, Your appearance sends a message to your co-workers, residents and prospective residents, and that has been proven time and again. Not only does a well-dressed associate convey professionalism to the consumer, but also, feeling good about one's appearance can add a level of confidence to a salesperson. That added confidence could make the difference in whether the salesperson closes the sale. It is this level of confidence that EQR's proposed dress code has put under attack.

Within the apartment industry, the educated consumer has a wide selection of comparable properties they may choose to reside. EQR has consistently driven market flow to its properties by holding its employees to a higher standard than its competitors. They hire well, have implemented innovative training techniques and treat their employees with respect and kindness. In return, EQR has been listed as one of Fortune's Most Admired Companies' and should be commended on their efforts. A recent article in Inc. Magazine reiterates the old adage, A happy employee is a good employee. Unfortunately, there is a negative buzz circulating through many of EQR's properties that has dropped employee morale. The recent rollout of EQR's new dress code has left many employees in a state of mild contempt.

The reasons for implementing a dress code are valid. EQR is striving to be America's Choice for Apartment Living and in order to achieve that goal, must maintain the same quality of service at each of its properties nationwide. Consumers like to feel comfortable and familiarity creates a comfort zone for them. It is great for the consumer to know that they can go to any EQR property in the nation and receive the exact same level of excellence, take advantage of all the same programs and benefits and find a comforting correlation in an employee dressed with the same style and color of clothing as their last leasing staff, in which they were so close. It is wonderful that EQR has fronted the bill for the cost of these clothes, in an attempt, to keep the workplace fair and prevent those unable or unwilling to purchase dress code compliant clothing from having to bare that expense. In an effort to be fair, though, those employees who are more than capable of purchasing their own clothes and take great pride in their appearance; have had to suffer.

In Malcolm Gladwell's new best-selling book, Blink, he talks about the unconscious perception our brain has about people after the first two seconds of meeting them. When we meet someone new, we often pick up on subtle signalsbrief facial expressions, made unconsciouslyYou wouldn't need to hear anything I was saying in order to reach these conclusions. They would just come to you, blink. This is a powerful message in sales and even salespeople who adopt the Fake It Till You Make It axiom, still give off subtle hints as to what they are really feeling, whether they do it consciously or not. So, how does the salesperson, who is upset with their company for putting them in clothes that demean their personality, sell that company's product without accidentally giving off one of these brief signals of discontent?

A corporate uniform has many advantages and in recent years has been adopted by many companies. EQR's decision to switch to uniform dress comes with a great deal of both good and logical reasoning. But, is it really necessary to force all employees to wear the same brand of clothing? After all, the garment industry is comprised of many different designers, not only to provide flair and originality, but also, to accommodate the hundreds of different body types and structures. It is ridiculous to think that because one person might look stunning in a Blue Bill Blass Premium Dress Shirt, coincidently, ALL people will look stunning in a Blue Bill Blass Premium Dress Shirt. Why not give employees the freedom to wear clothes that are tailored to their particular needs, given they stay within EQR's designated colors? EQR prides itself on having the best customer service in the industry and expects each of their employees to uphold that sterling tradition. Why not create a win/win situation that boosts employees' self-esteem, confidence and overall closing ratios? EQR has always put its employees first and reaped the benefits, time and time again. Let's keep that tradition alive and together we can make Equity Residential Properties, America's Choice for Apartment Living!

Sincerely,

Jon Ray

Equity Residential assured me that they would take my letter into consideration and I assured them that if a change was not made to the dress code policy, I would no longer serve as an employee of the company. A change was never made and while I was fortunate enough to be able to walk away, I left a huge percentage of the Equity Residential staff grumbling over their hideous new clothing.

Now, I'm not sure if Equity Residential has changed their dress code policy. It is my understanding that they have not. But, that is not the point of this post. The point is this: If you have a successful team of employees that are doing an excellent job and look above average in terms of professionalism on a daily basis, why would you force such an obvious team-morale declining sanction on the very employees that have done nothing but help your company grow?

I have never heard of a mandatory dress code that did not leave the majority of the employees it governed disgruntled. I have not been in the corporate world for some time (I started my own company after the Equity Residential fiasco, so that I would never have to adhere to a ridiculous dress code, again), but I hear horror stories about hideous dress codes being implemented in offices, all the time. What purpose does this serve, other than stifling individualism and squashing creative freedom?

I'd love to hear a good argument FOR dress code, as I have never heard one before.

RANT FINISHED ;)

<rant>

Let me tell you a story

Lid does a number of things around the Web, and sometimes I even find it hard to keep up. So I have a Google alert on her, so I can see what she is doing and what people are saying about her. That's my excuse anyways.

Last Friday I got an alert from Google with 3 references:

The references are:

1. Lid's ReadWriteWeb post about Social Media and who is doing it well from the Social Media Marketing Summit in San Francisco.
2. A post by Laurena about delicious and tagging which discusses and references Lid's article -just what the Web is intended for.
3. A post by Oggi' which looks remarkable like Lid's - it starts with the same 20 words - and even references her by name.

So who or what is Oggi's blog? Here is a screen shot.

Here is a breakdown of Oggi's blog:

1. 3 separate groups of Google advertising - two text based, and the third image based.
2. The title of the post which is the same as Lid's.
3. The content of the post is the same initial 20 words of Lid's post, then followed by Original post by Lidija Davis with Lid's name linked to her post on ReadWriteWeb.

Now the link on Lid's post is interesting in that it is not a direct link to the post on ReadWriteWeb, but rather an indirect link via Google's FeedBurner service. Here is the link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/nS1e6RgCjbw/social_media_for_business_who_is_doing_it.php

So what about the other posts on this blog? Surprise, surprise, they all reference other people's posts in exactly the same way. The same title is used, same first 20 words, and a link to the original post via FeedBurner.

Just to prove to myself that Google is still in fact indexing Oggi's blog, I did a site search for Lidija, and found two previous ReadWriteWeb posts.

So what is the point of Oggi's blog?

To hi-hack anyone who is searching for the title of noteworthy posts, so that if they click on the links, they will invoke 3 separate Google blocks of ads, with the user clicking through to the original article.

Now, who wins out of this?

1. Oggi - for the princely sum of a few fractions of a cent.
2. Google - for recording and charging the lucky advertisers for appearing on Oggi's blog - this too would be minimal; however, it is still money on the bottom line.

The individual amount of money changing hands is minimal; however, multiply this by the number of hapless visitors and it could get into the hundreds for Oggi, and multiply this by the number of Oggi clones out there and now you are getting into the thousands for Google. I must state that I have absolutely no clue as to the actual numbers, but I think I have underestimated both sets of numbers here.

So who loses?

1. The users of the Web for being distracted by useless profiteering
2. The advertiser.
3. The Web in general for being littered with content which has absolutely zero value.

So to recap:

1. I was sent an e-mail by Google alerting me to the existence of Oggi's blog, of which I was blissfully ignorant until then.
2. I visit Oggi's blog and find that I am reading a post of zero value to me, has zero content, well actually 29 words copied from elsewhere, and which is surrounded by 3 block's of Google advertisements.
3. The link to the original post is via Google's FeedBurner service.

The only thing which is not Google's is the blogging software, which is WordPress in this case. Otherwise, we would have had a clean sweep. Digressing a bit, we had a bit of fun last April fool's with this post on Google acquiring WordPress (remember this is not serious).

Now what Oggi is doing is cookie cutter stuff, so I can't see how Google cannot detect that the intent is none other than injecting a post in between the user and what they actually want to view and benefiting courtesy of Google ads.

But then the conspiracy person within me has a theory, and we all have one, just the degree varies (checkout ReadWriteWeb's very own post on Chrome)

Why aren't Google proactively purging such sites from their index, and thus alerts?

If they did then they loose money since ads are not being triggered.

I certainly hope this is not the case. I would expect that purging 100% of such sites from the index is actually impossible, but I think that low hanging fruit such as Oggi are simple enough for a group of 2-3 Googlers to solve - a few, ok, many, 20% days perhaps.

It maybe a long bow, but the theoretical dilemma is interesting, and no doubt finer minds than mine have discussed this to death.

I googled Google to see if you can report such blogs so this site is removed from the index, but the only thing I could find on the first page of the results, I am not a patient searcher, was a reference to reporting copyright infringements which requires me to mail in a letter (I kid you not).

I was expecting to find a report abuse' link one click away from the Google's home page, in About Google specifically.

With search being an integral part of everyone's online life now, and that given that googled' is now a verb, it plays a critical component of the Web, in that it potentially can control the pages which are viewed by users, thereby controlling the ads which are displayed, thereby controlling the potential revenue received by Google.

Google currently receives a lot of freedom in what they do, which they have rightly earned, but how can we be sure that this is not abused in the future?

How can we, the citizens of the Web, be assured that there is no conflict of interest between the search/index side of the business and the advertising side within Google?

Is there a common theme here? Checkout Michael Gray's view on Google's book search.

</rant>

Michael "Monty" Widenius, the leading mind behind the open-source database program MySQL, was credibly rumored to have resigned from Sun Microsystems last Thursday. Now Kaj Arn, the VP of community for MySQL AB, the Finnish company acquired by Sun for a billion bucks in January, has done a spectacular job of confusing the hell out of everyone with an equivocating post on the topic. Arn talked to Widenius and wrote: "Technically there is no resignation letter. However, I spoke to Monty yesterday, and yes, resignation is an option he considers ... In summary, I can neither confirm nor deny the rumour. But I hope my posting has shed some light on the situation." No, Kaj, no it hasn't. (Photo by Sebastian Bergmann)

As far as I can tell, the Associated Press is sticking by its ridiculous and unlawful assertion that direct quotations, even short ones are copyright infringements and result in lawsuit threats and DMCA takedown notices.

This story led us to ban the A.P., call the New York Times out on undisclosed conflicts of interest and begin to investigate some ridiculous organization called the Media Bloggers Association before getting bored and wandering off to other topics.

But now the A.P. has gone too far. They've quoted twenty-two words from one of our posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law. The offending quote, from this post, is here (I'm suspending my A.P. ban to report on this important story).

Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I've called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.

Next time, ask permission before you quote me. Or else.

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Dear Carl. We here at Yahoo got your letter telling us how much we suck. We think you suck more And let us tell you why. That's the short summary of Yahoo's response to Carl Icahn's letter yesterday telling Yahoo he will fight to oust their board and do a deal with Microsoft, assuming Microsoft is still willing. Plus, Yahoo does a deal with WPP on ad exchanges.

Click to continue reading...

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