Techie Wednesday

Here's some interesting stuff for you, my devoted Cake Eater Readers.

Because I love you. And if I don't keep you up on this stuff, well, who will? Because we all know that if you're surfing here, you're probably not surfing here

First up, courtesy of Mr. JVL, here's one interesting view of how our media might evolve. If you've ever wondered what Google's master plan is, well, I think this might give you a clue to their strategy. It certainly gave me one. {Insert warnings about grains of salt, etc. here}

Then we have this lovely little blogging tool from the Enlightened Cynic (aka the husband).

To try and be concise about it, if you're a blogger and you hate linking to NY Times stories because of registration woes or because the permalink will be dead three weeks after the original publication---and then they'll try to charge you for access---know that these guys have found a way to circumvent this noosey-nonsense. In essence, they have hacked the NY Times' RSS feed and have provided their own link generator.

I have a feeling this is a result of hackers/tech savvy bloggers taking umbrage at Arthur Sulzberger, Jr's incredulity over consumers---gasp!---expectation of free content. I don't know about the ethics of all this, but I will say this much: if I can access old NY Times articles at the library on microfiche, well, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to access their old articles online for free.

I don't know how long this link generator will work, but I'd be interested in hearing what people think about the big picture that this move represents. I believe that this is just one more example of the information revolt and how we're moving toward 24/7/365 free content. For any security feature that's introduced, the hackers will generate an answer. The question will be, when will the Times et. al., get this and come to a different way of tackling the problem? This tit for tat bullshit gets a bit annoying.

Posted by Kathy at January 26, 2005 11:02 AM