Evan Rudowski: Web Transplant

Ed Bott Misses the Mark

Ed Bott blogged last week about a pay site for programmers that frequently shows up in Google search results and irritates him and others because they find themselves at a pay wall when they click through to results. His somewhat heavy-handed solution? To ask Google to remove all pay sites from its index.

Of course there are many subscription websites that provide very useful knowledge and expertise to their communities. There are many sites worth paying for because they provide unique, actionable and valuable information, frequently updated, from trusted sources. We know because at SubHub we provide the publishing platform for many of these sites and we see the communities that have grown around them.

There is no reason why these sites should not be findable via Google for those who would find them relevant. If Google were to remove them from its index then Google itself would be providing an incomplete picture of available information sources, and would be failing at its mission of indexing all of the world’s information — not just all of the world’s free information.

What is interesting is that despite the complaints Botts' commenters seem to have about the specific site in question, many of the comments then go on to explain how to game the system using caching or blocking of cookies in order to get the information from the site for free. So it’s not that the information is not valuable, it’s that some people don’t want to pay for it.

I will leave it to others to comment on the ethics of doing this, but it strikes me as a bit dubious. If you don’t believe in paying for the information, fine, but don’t steal it. Many of Botts' readers seem to be programmers who presumably would object if someone swiped their intellectual property — their code — so why would they be comfortable swiping someone else’s intellectual property — their content?

What they seem to be saying is that they agree the content on the pay site is indeed valuable to them professionally, but they are too cheap to pay for it. Which does not lead to the conclusion that Google should remove such sites from its index, but rather that pay sites use solutions that do not make it quite so easy to get at the paid content.

Obama's Capital Gains Bombshell

Barack Obama said in last night's debate that he would consider raising the U.S. capital gains tax rate from its current 15 percent to as high as 28 percent, as reported in this New York Times article. Hillary Clinton stated that she would not raise it higher than 20 percent.

Given that he is willing to nearly double the capital gains tax rate, I wonder why Obama seems to be the darling of much of the Silicon Valley set?

Blogging It

I haven't blogged for a while, since about a month ago when I asked Paul McCartney to marry me (he hasn't replied yet, but I'm a patient man).

I'm now trying out TypePad's new "BlogIt" tool via Facebook and if it works as advertised it should be a lot easier and quicker for me to blog, so I hope to do it more often.

Now if only someone can come up with an app to cure long-windedness, I'll be all set.