Hi, Vint.
You missed one point of our service. EVERYTHING IS SEARCHEABLE. Repeat, people interested in MMO, Virtual Worlds, game commerce can find interesting posts from the blogosphere. MOREOVER, there is a custom search engine which indexes 50 thousand thematic web-sites having useful information about MMO and VW. I think you know what happens if you enter a search term even slightly related to MMO and VW in Google search? You get TEN PAGES of ‘WoW gold!’ pages with a spam. Try doing the same on our first page, we’ve built a specialized search engine for the BEST blogs (yours included) covering VW and MMO. Yours is in ‘Community Journalism’ section (any objections), other are in ‘News’, and ‘Reviews’. We think that we give away to anybody a significant value by this search engine. Also, talking about ’stealing’, have you ever seen Google Reader? It’s the same technology (and our page is a SEARCHEABLE feed reader with a chronological order of representations of search results to be presise). Please look closer into this issue of feed/news readers. Ours is THE BEST for now. Also, we consider this reader and specialized search engine (in ‘Learn’ section) a convenience for everybody. We are not requiring anybody to use other parts of our service. There is not advertisement on reader page and will never be. In the nearest future our users will be able to connect their in-game characters to their secure digital ID and sign posts and comments on any blog, social web-site supporting OpenID standard with their VERIFIED in-world names. That’s how what we are building is connected to needs and wants of the blogosphere.

As to ‘National Security Letters’, ‘DCMA notes’ etc., there’s no need in such formalities, just e-mail me and you are out of our index and our news wire. Which means, nobody will ever find your blog through our specialized search (many people are using it already). Other possible steps - adding ‘no robots’ to robots.txt file on your site and Google Reader will not index your posts for their Reader too (sorry for the comparison, but it’s just THE SAME technology, only our’s is better).

Regards, Alex

P.S. Really, if you want us to exclude your feed from the news wire, please let me know ASAP.

BTW, Vint,

you missed how the posts are presented in our news-wire (and you wrote about it but probably didn’t notice):
1. DIRECT lint to the source itself
2. DIRECT permalink to the post on the source site
3. Author is crearly stated
4. Date of the post on the source.
5. ‘More’ link to the continuation of the material on the source site.

How is this ’stealing’? C’mon, Vint! Please. Also, in the search world EVERYTHING is cached, this cache is called ‘index’, be it Google index, MS Live search index or any other. It is done for the fast representation of search results. It’s not an ‘archive’ as you call it.

In one you are right, we collect news from more than 1000 wonderful sources of, I repeat, community journalism and newswired, people are adding their blogs and sites to our index. Actually, you are the first person who is complaining.

Regards(2)

I already IM’d you in-world, but will repeat here: yes, please do remove my content.

Why do I consider this one stealing? Because your website is clearly an commercial enterprise, and the fact that it’s not generally done, does not mean asking for permission before syndicating is not the right thing to do. You post information for one reason only, and that’s getting people on your webpage to eventually read about the google card. You might abide to the attribution part, you’re in no way not violating the non-commercial part. I might have bought your story if you would only syndicate the first 200 words or smth from a blogpost. But you got them entirely most of the time.

As for Google cache, as far as I know, up to now, no ads are displayed with the content, so I do not see - that part of Google - as a commercial enterprise. Besides, they gave me Analytics, and I love them for that! ;)

And my Google searches on Virtual Worlds, I am rather capable of managing those on my own. -gold does wonders for WoW, btw. ;)

My compliments though, on the quick and decent reaction on my protests. And good luck with the trans-virtual-world registration thingie.

Thank you, Vint.
And once again (I sent it to your IM). I apologise for our fully automated robot that had discovered your feed around Dec. 18 and considered it relevant to our criteria for ‘Community journalism’. :) This is the world we live in. I apologise for the robot. :) hehe. Thank you for your prompt notice and … come back soon. :)

Regards

P.S. Google is a ‘non-commercial’ enterprise? :) I can’t believe it, I saw the stock market quotes lately :) And if I remember the SEC filing right it’s 3billion a month in profit right now… Quite non-commercial, almost ‘non-profit’. :) Sorry for the irony, just couldn’t stand saying that. Have you seen ALL of your pages ‘Cached’ there, btw? I mean - STORED on their servers and available for reading to anybody FROM their server? I have a feeling that it can be called ’stealing’ too in a same sense.

Tao may not be MIA, but he hasn’t been adding many people requesting to be added to the feed for quite some time. (I know a handful personally who’ve been waiting for months, and I don’t actually know all that many people in SL!)

You forgot the new elitist blog feed at http://fashionfeedofsl.com/

Alex, yes, I do find the robot - although with a great taste for quality blogs - to be very unmannered. :p

Re: Google’s archiving - You should have read my fine prints! so I do not see - that part of Google - as a commercial enterprise. They do - again, as far as I know - do not feed their cached sites to other search engine’s, so it’s - although according to my reasoning probably still ‘a crime’ - a different story. Of course, it’s a part of the bigger Commercial Google’s whole, and I might detest it someday, but at the moment, I’m fine with it.

Update regarding Grid.IHeartSL.com:

Although defending the archiving by saying ‘people asked for it’ - well, I did not - and the anonymous domain registration with ‘look at how easy Vint can find out the info’ -, the latter I might have accepted if they from starters provided decent contact information on the site, Melanie Kidd did react to this blogpost: just not here. *rolls out, nice how they just assume you’ll find out using technorati or whatever*

Grid.IheartSL.com now has a FAQ with contact information. Information about opting in (and out):

How do I opt-in or opt-out? (from iheartsl.com’s feed aggregator/syndication)

Having your blog added to or removed from our feed is easy! Simply send us an email at iheartsl@gmail.com and include your blog name, URL, feed URL, avatar name (optional), and e-mail address (optional).

While the reasons why we ask for your blog information is readily apparent, some may question the need for your avatar’s name or your e-mail address. The only reason why we ask for that information is so that it makes it easier for us to contact you either in-world or via e-mail. We have the UTMOST respect for your privacy and this information WILL NOT be shared. However, we understand that some will prefer to simply not share that information, which is why we are making it optional.

They also saved me the trouble of having to e-mail them asking to remove my feed from the aggregator. I do find some email or IM notification on that would have been appropriate, although I’m glad I’ll stay ‘opted out’ until they get rid of the archiving thingie. Which they are not planning to do anywhere soon.

Not, I’m not such a fashionista myself. But that makes three in total for Second Life Fashion too?

- fashion @ the planet
- fashion @ iheartsl.com
- fashionfeedofsl.com

?

Mel have always been a nice lady, adding stuff like that must have just slipped her mind trying to make something nice for us. Personally i have nothing about an archive of my stuff. I’m more irritated about the supposed GPL AO I got yesterday night, no transfer, no modify…

Tao has been VERY negilgent in his duties. Not only my blog but dozens of others who have requested to be syndicated have seen no response at all from him. I hope you and Melanie come to some sort of agreement on this since I’ve pretty much stopped looking at World of SL. A lot of the content I liked to follow has made the move over and it would be a shame if your blog was dropped. I don’t use my own aggregator and I don’t regularly check blogs one by one which means I may not read your blog on a regular manner as I used to. :(

Fashion Feed of SL is NOT an elitist blog. It is filtered and moderated for content.

When I created the feed, I did it for ME, for two reasons. The blogs that I wanted to read were not added to the Fashion Planet feed, and I found myself scrolling through ALOT of “freebie” posts, “drama llama” posts, duplicate “reviews” of the same item, and (I know I’m gonna get flamed for this) alot of “another fashion blog”s.

When I shared what I’d done with friends, word got out. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to share my project with everyone because I don’t want anyone to crucify me for my taste in quality, entertaining SL Fashion content. I realize this situation is a “darned if you do, darned if you don’t” but I really hate to hear FashionFeedofSL being referred to as an elitist feed. From my point of view, though, I didn’t really need another FashionPlanet with a hodge podge of anything remotely relating to fashion thrown on a page…and based on the feedback I’ve gotten lately…alot of people share that opinion.

I do appreciate your point about opting out though. I haven’t yet had anyone ask to be removed, probably because 90% of the feeds have been added on request, but I definitely want to make that option available.

GoSpeed, I hope Tao will update the Planet’s lunch box a bit, as as long as Melanie Kidd does not get rid of the archives, I do not feel tempted to being syndicated by her IheartSL.

As for having your own aggregator, do give it a try. It’s awesome. Mine even has a ’search’ function, which makes the ‘archiving style’ aggregators superfluous. And you may easily export the list of feeds you are following, subdivide them in folders, mark things as ‘read’ or ‘unread’, etc. *hugs the reader*

I’m not concerned who slurps the content of my feeds… data wants to spread naturally, who am I to stop it?

thought a while about this.
crap - “who am i?”: i am the author! i MADE it. i say -stop- whenever i want, unless i SOLD it to someone else.

yesterday i realized that someone took all my content and publishes it every day. ALL pictures, ALL texts. with a link, yes - but no one uses it! it’s all THERE, why should anyone take the link and come over?

i didnt realize it by incoming traffic (analytics), but by a self-google-search. the site keepers didnt ask me, of course.
i dont like this.

being a professional author, i make a living of what i write and say - not on the blog, but at my radio/book/audiobook jobs.
if ANYbody can take it and make money (MOST sites like this ARE to make money, if not by ads, then via selling web/SL/other sevices like building a SLpresence, after people are being hooked with the help of MY unpaid work), this is not fair.

i will ask those guys to stop taking my content, i hope they do.