June 21st, 2008
An answer to AP's anti-blog policy: quote freely but carry adtribution link
Associated Press upset a lot of people with its new policy of restricting the use of its news stories in blogs and other web sites. But I have a proposal that could benefit everyone that creates content that is re-used or quoted by others.
My proposal is the “adtribution link.” This is a text ad link that would be displayed alongside or at the end of any post that quotes content from a site that carries adtribution links.
For example, this post would carry the following adtribution link selected by myself. If you quote from this post I would ask that you carry my adtribution link somewhere on the page.
This is a request, you don’t have to do it. But if you’d like to be respectful, and also support the work of this blog/writer/media outlet then it would be great if you would republish this adtribution link: Order the amazing Amazon Kindle Electronic Book Reader - find out why people are raving about it.
This doesn’t cost you anything and it helps support quality media production in a world where spiders harvesting content and displaying Google adsense next to it are the prime business model for media and which cannot support the production of real journalism.
Maybe if AP adopted a similar approach, something along the lines of: quote freely from AP news stories but please carry an adtribution link one per paragraph.
And maybe AP could provide a choice of adtribution links, which might include some public service ads. At least that would be a way AP could have its cake (the massive distribution platform of the Internet) and also recover some of the value that its news stories provide - and at no cost at all to all the bloggers blogging.
What do you think?
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If you quote from this post it would be great if you could republish the following Adtribution link: Order the amazing Amazon Kindle Electronic Book Reader - find out why people are raving about it.
Just copy and paste this code without change into your page, thank you:
Tom Foremski reports on the business and culture of Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology and media. He also writes at Silicon Valley Watcher. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/22/08
