CLICKHERDER

Right off the bat I don’t like Gavin O’Reilly. He’s the guy who thinks that Google became Google by leaching off of media sites in order to populate aggragators like Google News. Yeah, that’s right. Google got great by grabbing RSS feeds from the Pucksetawnee Tribune Gazette.

Gavin’s also the president of the World Association of Newspapers. The WAN is leading a bunch of newspaper, magazine and book publishers on a chumps’ crusade to gain a slice of the search engine souffle. This gaggle of would-be Google-busters claim the aggregators are aggressors. Never mind all the traffic these aggregators send to the news sites. The half a paragraph Google uses to send you to the content providers’ actual site is, to use Gavin’s own word, kleptomania. Unbelievable.

My dearest wish is that Google and other aggregators would setup a “please do not syndicate me” list, and then simply comply with their wishes. Don’t send traffic to any idiot dumb enough to accuse the referrer of theft. Yeah, that dog’ll hunt.

Somehow they think the reading public will sympathize; old media is trying to start a slow clap. But that doesn’t work in the middle of a montage.

Technorati: syndication, RSS, Google, old media, Gavin O’Reilly

Filed by Joel at 8:53 pm under Web Marketing