[LINK] the media vs. new media wars

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Professor Klerphell writes :-)

> Use of Sourcer is expected to eliminate the need for online readers
> to access newspaper web sites, which should alleviate Mr. Murdoch's
> concern over plagiarism.

Google: 'Same Protocol, More Options for News Publishers'
 
Wednesday, December 2, 2009 8:10  
http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com
"The Official Blog from the Team at Google News"


There are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google 
News today. 

That's because Google News is a great source of readers, sending 
publishers about 1 billion clicks every month. 

Each of those clicks is an opportunity for publishers, allowing them to 
show ads, sell subscriptions and introduce readers to the great content 
they produce every day. 

While we think this offers a tremendous opportunity for any publisher who 
wants new readers, publishers are the ones who create the content and 
they're in control of it. If they decide they don't want to be in Google, 
it's easy to do. 

Today, we're making it even easier with a web crawler specifically for 
Google News.

Publishers have always had the ability to block Google from including 
their content in Google's index. 

How? With something called Robots Exclusion Protocol (or REP) - a web-
wide standard supported by all major search engines and any reputable 
company that crawls the web. When our crawler arrives at any site, it 
checks to see if there's a robots.txt file to make sure we have 
permission to crawl the site. 

With this file, or similar REP directives on specific pages, publishers 
can block their entire site, certain sections or individual pages. They 
can also give instructions on how they want us to index their content, 
such as telling us to exclude images or snippets of text. Furthermore, 
they can apply different instructions to different crawlers, giving 
access to some while blocking others.

The new Google News web crawler extends these controls to Google News. 

If they wanted to, it's always been easy for publishers to keep their 
content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search. They just 
had to fill out a simple contact form in our Help Center. 

Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of 
Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put 
instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt 
file they have today. 

In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers 
to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also 
be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. 

Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. 
Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel 
free. 

All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is 
REP.

Our users shouldn't notice any difference. Google News will keep helping 
people discover the news they're looking for, different perspectives from 
across the world and new sources of information they might not otherwise 
have found.

While this means even more control for publishers, the effect of opting 
out of News is the same as it's always been. It means that content won't 
be in Google News or in the parts of Google that are powered by the News 
index. 

For example, if a publisher opts out of Google News, but stays in Web 
Search, their content will still show up as natural web search results, 
but they won't appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows 
up in Web Search, called Universal search, since those come from the 
Google News index. 

Most people put their content on the web because they want it to be 
found, so very few choose to exclude their material from Google. But we 
respect publishers' wishes. If publishers don't want their websites to 
appear in web search results or in Google News, we want to give them easy 
ways to remove it. We're excited about this change and will start rolling 
it out today. If you see any problems or have any questions, please let 
us know. 

Also: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5B13VF20091202?
feedType=nl&feedName=ustechnology&pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=11617

Cheers,
Stephen