on Apr 8th, 2007Automated Portals – Can there be a turing test for such sites ?
First here is an example ..
User generated content is undoubtedly the most updated and prevalent form of digital information. People are looking to cash in on user generated content by serving targeted ads and other means of revenue generation, but how do you know what sites are actually publishing them and what are just replicating or even plagiarizing the information.
If you are a blog publisher, lots of times you come across automated portals which give you the latest information on topics of your choice. Its not hard actually, buy a domain say latesttechstuff.com and then syndicate some of the most influential RSS/ATOM feeds from some reputed bloggers, add a couple of banner ads and targeted ads in between and voila , you have a completely automated portal which brings in the latest information. Whats so wrong in this you ask? how about credibility of the information and credit to the original publisher. Some portals are kind enough to send trackbacks and provide links to the articles and provide only a summary, many don’t and claim the information to be their own.
What about other issues like branding, NY times for example, spends a lot of money gathering news and other info from organization like Reuters, but individual web publishers, tap into these information through RSS feeds and claim it to be their own. Even though syndication did wonders to the publishing factor on the web, the essence of ownership of content just slipped completely. Many blogs do support the Creative Commons Licensing, but I am not sure how many even know if its existence. The result being, lots of automated portals targeting certain audiences, publish data from other sources claiming its their own and cash in on those content, without providing the right credits or following processes.
This issue needs to looked at from a very serious point of view to understand its complexity. Those who are willing to provide feeds are alright, but the others who do not offer feeds are also not spared. Tools like OpenKapow , Dapper etc allow users to create feeds for data which aren’t exposed as feeds. Where is the control here ? Mashups have taken the control out of the users hands.
The need of the hour is to have a turing test for websites and its publishers. Most of these publishers don’t bother to check up on the site, so a sort of test to claim its source, relevance, publisher and also set standards like providing hyperlinks to the original source and so on. As publishers yourself, please follow these simple rules :
- Do not expose information that you call a niche on to the outside world
- Update your robo.txt file to allow only valid crawlers
- Make sure your RSS has a mention of you and your organization somewhere.
