I sometimes (ok, most of the time) see things differently than a lot of people. I look at things from various angles and here’s an angle that doesn’t seem to have been covered yet.

It’s about Google’s recent release of their custom search engine.

I see dead people lawsuits. Big ones.

When someone Googles a word or phrase the result is a list of relevant sites and web pages, most often with a list of paid ads above and down the side of the results. Google is so huge and has so many users that millions of people a day search for stuff there and if your site is relevant for a popular keyword or phrase they can send you lots of targeted traffic.

So, of course everyone wants their sites listed and ranking there, even though it’s your content that Google is making money from if someone chooses to click the ads in their results. It’s a tradeoff and we’ve come to take it for granted.

But what if I set up one of those custom search engines for, say, electronic gadgets. Then I customize the search engine to show only results from about 100 or so gadget sites. Then I include AdSense ads in the results just like Google does.

Someone searches for the latest GPS gadget at my search engine and instead of, or in addition to, clicking the natural search results, they click on an ad and I make a few cents.

Great, right? I’ve set up a great site and am making money from it.

But what if major online publishers like WeblogsInc see this as me making money off their content, for which they get nothing. After all, what it all boils down to is - It IS their content I’m making money from. Google’s custom search engine just enables me to aggregate that content and deliver it to my visitors. The end result is me making money off it.

Jason Calacanis’ stance on the issue of other people making money off his company’s content is very strong and I know other online companies take a similar approach.

What happens when thousands of these little search engines spread across the web and these companies clue in to the fact that Google is enabling us to essentially pull their content and make money off it?

Youtube has been hit and ordered to take down content that’s being distributed through their service or risk facing heavy lawsuits. I know the circumstances surrounding that service are quite different, but the ghist of it is the same - content is being distributed and monetized with no financial rewards to the original publisher or content creator.

Is it just me that sees a potential major backlash from content publishers here?

Ok, while Jason Calacanis addresses the issue of sleazy services popping up where people pay for or trade with others votes and artificial bumping of news stories on Digg and Netscape, he says the following about social news sites:

“it is a privilege to engage in these systems”

I recognize the problem he’s talking about in his post, and it’s a big problem that needs to be nipped in the bud. I applaud Jason for taking immediate action against this. But the quote above is the reason why I just unsubscribed from Jason’s blog and will be removing the Netscape buttons from my blogs ASAP.

To AOL - An anti-social person who looks down on all others as being lesser (or “Low Rent,” a term he’s used in the past) and thinks others are “Privileged” to be able to use social news and networking sites, should NOT be in charge of a social news and networking site.

Jason, sorry man, my ever dwindling respect for you as a blogger and social networking evangilist has now vanished completely.

Jason, Kevin Rose of Digg.com and and yourself with inheriting the Netscape.com domain and userbase are both extremely Lucky and Privileged to have people visit and build your sites for you.

Your biggest problem isn’t people trying to scam their way to the top of your site, it’s your “Holier than thou” attitude that will be your downfall. You need to get back in touch with the people who really matter in the grand scheme of things, on their level - Your Readers and the people who are building your sites for you.

I’m writing this out of sheer frustration.

I’ve tried numerous desktop RSS aggregators (news readers, feed readers, etc.) over the past 3 years and still haven’t found one I can live with. They’re either so inflexible and complicated to use that they’re time wasters, or so feature bloated that the whiz bang widgets and coolio little thingys get in the way of their core purpose - to organize and read news feeds.

Now, this last one, the one I’ve been using for about 8 months just upgraded their software and it keeps crashing. There’s no way to revert back to the version that actually worked for me.

Online aggregators? Pheh. The ones I’ve tried are even worse than the desktop ones.

So my project right now is to make my own, the way I want it. The only thing I want to see is a list of the most recent headlines among the feeds I subscribe to. I want to see up to 10 from each source. That’s it. And a nice little feature would be to have the most important news - the stuff everyone is blogging about - rise to the top of that list.

The idea is so simple yet it hasn’t been done properly. Techmeme comes close though, but I can’t use their technology to bookmark and read feeds I like.

So I’m up to my eyeballs in PHP code and some sort of algorythm to weight news headlines based on the most talked about keywords.

Wish me luck.

If I’ve subscribed to 200 technology feeds and they all update once per day, I’d like to just go to a page and see all the headlines listed.

If 31 of those tech news sources think a particular story is important enough to write about, I’d like that headline to float to the top of my page with the rest of the headlines listed below, in order of importance, according to how many sites wrote about each story.

Automatic filtering, with the most prolific news at the top, all in a single, easily scanable list.

Is that too much to ask for?

Or do I have to build this myself

I (75%) like the new backend interface and functionality of WP 2.

The WYSIWYG editor is cool. It’ll take a bit of getting used to but all in all it will take you about 15 minutes to check everything out. (seems a little buggy at first though - but a 2.0.X release should address that)

I like the way I can move the tabs for categories, post status, author, etc. up and down and expand or collapse them on the write post page. That’s cool.

Edit: I LOVE the post preview browser that lets you view what your post page will look like before you publish it. Very Cool.

The other minor tweaks should also help bloggers spend less time on admin tasks and more on blogging…

The one thing I don’t like, is the depreciation of the Upload tab. I used to use it for images. I would edit and find the image on my computer, upload it, add an alt description and copy/paste the link into a blog post. Now it seems that task will take some modifying or tweaking. This would be especially annoying for blogs that rely heavily on images as content, like Gadgetizer.com

(Hint: I won’t upgrade to WP 2 there until I’ve done more investigating)

Another quirk is that some of the right-click functionality has been dropped in the write screen - ie: copy, cut, paste, etc. and that hasn’t been replaced in the tabs on the write window. Maybe it’s browser specific or something, but I miss those. When writing a post I like to copy, cut and paste within the window a lot.

Edit: The above is a nonissue, since by going to Options > Write and disabling the rich text editor, it reverts back to the normal write window options.

Must be a web 2.0 thing or something. Or the added javascript is disabling stuff… whatever.

Overall, as I said above, I’m 75% liking it… but it needs work.

Those are my first impressions. I’ll keep WP 2 here on this site cause it’s kinda neat, but I would strongly advise anyone running a production blog or network to set it up on a test site first and let your staff log in and play with it before deploying it.

Ok, I’ve just read up some posts on WMW and Brett Tabke goes into a highly detailed explanation of why he banned the SE (and other) bots from the site. Here’s his Attack of the Robots post (login may be required).

On a site I sold a few months back, I was having similar problems, but obviously nowhere near the scale of what Brett and WMW are going through, where one bot in particular was chewing through pages at a rate of 120,000 a day and eating more bandwidth than actual site visitors. I disallowed that bot in my robots.txt file and within hours everything was fine.

A representative of that company (a very large SE) actually emailed me a few weeks later saying that they wanted to recrawl my site and that they wanted to further contact me to offer any help or get my input on how they could fairly crawl the site. Unfortunately, I had already sold the site and was switching ownership over as the email arrived.

Anyway, I’ve strayed from the topic of this post.

The point of all this is: Webmaster World, one of the most cherished sites in my bookmarks and what I personally consider to be one of the most valuable sources of unadultrated info on the internet… is no longer available in search engines because of rogue scraper bots that have no respect for anyone - people trying to learn something - the site owner - the community around it - the contributors to that have built that community and it’s info. and the internet in general. See Brett’s post here for more info.

Things like this just really get me down sometimes. It’s like a library having to post a security guard at their doors because people are stealing books.

What a shame this is.