Huffing and Puffing and Scamming the Search Engines

The humor site The Onion, the offbeat weekly The Chicago Reader, and Time Out Chicago have discovered that some of their articles have appeared in total on Arianna Huffington’s mega web outlet The Huffington Post. And they are none too happy about the wholesale lifting of their material, either.

http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2008/12/21/huffington-post-stealing-others-writing/

The Huffington Post, a venture-capital-backed new media site that mixes links to other sites content with hundreds of celebrity and volunteer blogger posts, is being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content.

Whet Moser, an editor at alternata]ive weekly Chicago Reader wants to know why The Huffington Post's newly formed Chicago-focused venture is stealing their copyrighted concert reviews and reprinting them in whole in order to get search engine traffic. And he found other examples taken wholesale from The Onion and Time Out Chicago.

Compare for example, the Chicago Reader's Amanda Palmer review and The Huffington Post's (screenshots if the pages change: Reader, The Huffington Post)

Moser writes:

You want to do a post that says, "According to Jessica Hopper, Bon Iver rules, check 'em out, go here for the info," fine. But taking an entire concert preview is bush league. Doing it as a practice is just beneath contempt. If the future of journalism--which everyone keeps telling me The Huffington Post represents — is a bunch of search-engine optimization scams, we have bigger problems than Sam Zell's bad investment strategies.

But The Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti says the contretemps are overblown — that the complete re-printing was a mistaken editorial call and that The Huffington Post's intention in aggregating other publications' content is to send traffic their way.

"You tease, you pull out a piece of it, and then you have a headline or link out," Peretti said. "Generally publishers are psyched to have a link."

He compares The Huffington Post's influence on other sites traffic to that of link-voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Those sites, along with Google News and Slashdot, rely on small excerpts or user submitted summaries of online content in order to create lists of the best new content on the web.

But none of those aggregation sites, including Google News, uses as much of a percentage of copyrighted content as The Huffington Post does.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/huffpo-slammed.html

Is this right? Is the Huffington Post simply the future of journalism? Is Journalism Ethics dead? Click here to comment:
http://sarah-palin-2012.blogspot.com/2009/04/huffing-and-puffing-and-scamming-search.html#comments



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Al Gore Gave us the Internet /sarc Now Obama Threatens to Take it Away.......

OBAMA SEEKS NET CONTROL ....ENCROACHING FASCISM

"The cybersecurity threat is real," says Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which obtained the draft of S.773, "but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy."

I agree, the cybersecurity threat is real alright - from the government.

Soon He May Control The Internet - Cool

A bill pending in Congress, The Cybersecurity Act of 2009, sponsored by John Rockefeller (D) and Olympia Snowe (R) attempts to deal with very real threats to the nation's cyber-infrastructure. Attacks on military, government and civilian cyber-infrastructure are all too real, and it is time the nation woke up to the problem.

But one provision in the bill has received scant attention, other than an article in Mother Jones (via Memeorandum). The provision allows the President to declare a cyber emergency, shut down the internet, and access almost any cyber-information. The President may

declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network" (Sec. 18(2))

The term "United States critical infrastructure information system or network" includes federal, state and local governmental, and non-governmental systems or networks. In other words, everything. (Sec. 23(3)) The President also

shall have access to all relevant data concerning such networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access. (Sec. 14(b)(1))

The standards in the Act as to what constitutes an emergency, and what the President can do with the information, are unacceptably vague. While cyber-security is increasingly important, I worry about giving such sweeping powers to ANY President, much less one who already has created a cult of personality enabled, in part, by an adoring media.

And with Rahm Emanuel, John Podesta, and James Carville at the President's side, we all can sleep peacefully knowing that the information gathered through this program will not be used for political purposes.

Remember all the fury from the Left over the Patriot Act and other attempts to give the government the ability to intercept communications believed to be between terrorists? Or to provide immunity to telecommunications companies which cooperate with the government? Why the silence here from the always-critical-of-anything-which-makes-us-safer blogs and public interest groups?

ACLU, HuffPo, Talking Points Memo, Glenn Greenwald, FireDogLake, Ezra Klein, etc. - Where are you?

UPDATE: Apparently the techies were onto this before the rest of us. E-week (h/t Libertarian Republican) has a good discussion of the bill and notes the unintended consequences of homogenizing cyber-security infrastructure:

The bill would also impose mandates for designated private networks and systems, including standardized security software, testing, licensing and certification of cyber-security professionals.

"Requiring firms to get government approval for new software would hamper innovation and would have a negative effect on security," Nojeim said. "If everyone builds to the same standard and the bad guys know those standards it makes it easier for the bad guys."

http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/04/soon-he-may-control-internet-cool.html

© Janet Crain

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