Briefs: Yahoo Tries To Catch Widget Wave; News Sites Unveil System To Control Content On Search Engines; Online Traffic on Cyber Monday up 26% Over 2006
+ Yahoo! Tries To Catch Widget Wave (via Forbes)
As the article points out, Yahoo has been trying to "catch the widget wave" since acquiring Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) nearly 2.5 years ago. Today, the company is announcing that it's going to make it easier for developers to build widgets. Stay tuned. It's one thing to build and it's something else for people to download and something else again for people to make use of regularly once downloaded. To put it in the language of the film, "Field of Dreams," building it does NOT MEAN people will come and use it. Visit the Yahoo Widget Gallery.
See Also: MuseStorm
See Also: Google Gadgets (with download counts)
See Also: PageFlakes
See Also: Netvibes
See Also: Facebook App Directory
News Sites Unveil System To Control Content On Search Engines
Two issues here.
1) News organizations have always had the ability to use Robots.txt and other tools to not allow crawlers to crawl and/or cache their content. We've always wondered why more didn't use their content management systems to set content to expire on a specific date. Eventually, the content would disappear (assuming the engine respected robots.txt) would disappear. Well, after reading this entire article either the tech (Automated Content Access Protocol) was not available or no one was really paying attention (aka caring).
The new proposal, to be unveiled Thursday by a consortium of publishers at the global headquarters of The Associated Press, seeks to have those extra commands - and more - apply across the board. Sites, for instance, could try to limit how long search engines may retain copies in their indexes, or tell the crawler not to follow any of the links that appear within a Web page.
The current system doesn't give sites "enough flexibility to express our terms and conditions on access and use of content," said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, one of the organizations behind the proposal. "That is not surprising. It was invented in the 1990s and things move on."
2) Another issue, people or bots simply copying and pasting the news content from a news source and making it their own. This issue is not addressed by this new proposal but it's another way the content can stay "on the web." What are publishers doing about these issues? See:
+ Copyright Cops Gain New Weapon: Attributor Corp.
+ Attributor Corp First RS Mention
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
