Associated Press is suing MOREOVER, a news aggregator, for LINKING to its news. Wow! This is very funny. (See story here)
According to Google, Technorati and other sites that rank websites, the Internet or World Wide Web is SUPPOSED to be a LINKING community. Thus, if nobody links to your website or blog, that is supposed to mean that your blog is not "AUTHORITATIVE". According to these "ranking" sites, a blog that is linked to by 100 sites but visited by only 200 people is much much more authoritative than one that is linked to by only 10 sites but visisted by thousands of people.
Perhaps afraid of being sued, Google had made some arrangements with AP.
But what is wrong with linking? It drives more more traffic to your site. Isn’t that why people put up sites? It is nothing like plagiarism.
On the other hand, there are tens of thousands of blogs that merely link to other blogs. They really do not have any original idea. In fact, I sometimes wonder if people realize that my published essays that I post in my blogs were written by me. I usually write at the end of the essay, "Published in __________ on _______." But I don’t usually indicate that it was written by me. I presume that since it is my blog, people would immediately conclude that it is my article. But I have seen so many blogs that have articles written by other people. They simply link the source URL.
I also take snippets of other people’s articles but I clearly mark them as such and usually write the source URL in the beginning aside from linking them. I usually add my comments, too.
It would be interesting to see what would come out of the AP suit.
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