I would like to put my understanding across of what the NLA are doing with respect to “linking”. Firstly, to make it clear I support their activity in principle. I don’t agree that they are licensing link per say (this message has been garbled by detractors, and perhaps by ingenuous marketing manager at the NLA), they are instead licensing the content and it’s use by commercial aggregators. That use of content does not only refer to the presentation of the content (as in re-publishing) but about how it is collected (indexed), stored and retrieved). As a professional who knows the heuristics of running web environment, I expect you would agree that the commercial aggregators aren’t providing any real-benefit to publishers and their traffic is not worth the the electricity used for the cpu cycles caused by their scraping activity. The intention of most U.K publishers is not to block you or I in our individual capacities, or even google, bing, yahoo et al who provide valuable services to us but instead to ensure a fair and equitable relationship is achieved with commercial aggregators or those “search engines” which use other people’s content to drive their services and in turn charge their end-users for that service. I would argue with some conviction that the large scale aggregators have a fair argument that their tipping-point traffic generation is indeed worth the cpu-cycles and to me that seem to be a reciprocal arrangement that most publishers are happy with. The NLA have gone further, and with investment from the publishers they launching a platform (eClips Web) which hooks directly to the newspaper’s CMS’s, aggregates and outputs a high-quality strutured feed and a permalink facility (with many other features) which promises to improve these mid-level aggregators services and offers them an opportunity to reduce overall running costs. If eClips Web manages to do what it says on the tin then indeed the offering will trump any scraper in terms of quality, timeliness, consistency, coverage and reliability.

I think this is really a case of “biting the hand that feeds” and it would be in both the aggregators interests and the publishers interests to communicate more effectively and work with each to find a win-win solution.

Love the Sherlock Holmes theme… Holmes is engaging and challenging. By fitting your information into a story analysis format, the reader relates to the characters and is more likely to retain the information.

Very Creative!!
Thanks!