This is an interesting area of law. Eric Goldman has an rundown of the issues.

In my mind, there’s no question that a blogger grants an implied license to the content in an RSS feed. However, because it’s implied, I’m just not sure of the license terms. So, in theory, it could be an implied license to permit aggregators to do whatever they want.
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It is trivial to destroy an implied license, so bloggers can overcome any aggregator use simply by saying so. I’m not sure WHERE the blogger would need to say this (by the “syndicate” link? in the xml feed itself?). Perhaps any disclosure in any reasonable place would be sufficient to destroy the implied license.

So it would seem that Tobias has reasonably withdrawn his implicit license by placing the notice in the feed itself, as a post. The question of where a reasonable place to put such a notice is important. Since one can subscribe to an RSS feed without ever visiting the parent site, I think perhaps the only reasonable place for a terms of service for a feed is within the feed itself. Snow vs. DirectTV suggests that a warning isn’t necessarily enough to overcome an implicit license. Of course, I am not a lawyer so my interpretation may be flawed.

So what did PHP freaks do to incur Tobias’ ire? They republish content from RSS feeds and added advertising. I think adding advertising to aggregated content is perfectly legal. (I’m sure Google and Yahoo see things the same way when they place advertising in their web based mail readers.) However, phpfreaks uses an contextual advertising that replaces words in the content with advertising links, shades of the microsoft smart tags debacle. In PHP freaks’ favor they are very clear about attributing the source of their syndicated content and the fact that it is syndicated. Many aren’t. Additionally, the links are marked with a double underline and cause a hover box to appear which clearly labels them as advertising.

Still, I suppose one could make the argument that it is unclear who placed the advertising in the content, php freaks, or Tobias. For that reason, I think this form of advertising on third party content cross a line.

I am not anti-advertising in general. Advertising directly and indirectly pays many of my bills and I don’t begrudge someone else the opportunity to make a buck. I am also a publisher of copy righted content. And I’d rather that I made the buck off of my content than someone else. I think Tobias has the right to control the use of his material.

What do you think?

Welcome Back Harry.

Also, unless I’m mistaken, it looks like SitePoint is using WordPress for their blogs now. Or has this always been the case and I’m just now noticing it?

Unfortunately, this version of WordPress introduced one bug that really annoys me. Pingbacks and Trackbacks aren’t using the permalinks, but instead using ugly query string links.

A little greping suggests that this is caused by a cache that becomes stale after a post is updated. So, I think the solution is to insert this line:

 
unset($post_cache[$post_ID]);
 

on line 382 of wp-admin/post.php.

Since this post contains a link to another blog post, which should get a pingback, it will be my public test of the theory.

UPDATE: Bug fixed.

When i started blogging, I didn’t know quite what to expect. Over time, two main topics emerged: PHP and Politics. I’ve decided that the two topics should really be two separate blogs. This blog will continue to focus on PHP, software design, web design, agile methods and open source. To reflect the tighter focus, I’ve renamed this blog from Jeff Moore’s Blog to Professional PHP. (Getting rid of the bad-software revealing apostrophe in the name was a major goal.)

All other previous posts have been redirected to my new blog, Lively Debate. That blog will cover politics, economics, education, entertainment and food. Check it out.

The old posts on these topics remain on this blog, but are redirected to Lively Debate. There will be no new “non-professional” content here.

As part of the process of bifurcating blogs, I’ve changed the category structure here as well. Some categories have been moved. The software development category has been deprecated. All the posts except this one have been removed from that category.

Some people subscribed to the software development category in order to avoid the political content. If you have done so, I would encourage you to subscribe to the main site feed now. In a couple weeks, I will delete the software development category and redirect the feed to the main site feed. (Once the political content slides off the bottom of the feed.)

My summer posting hiatus should be over (my blades broke and frost will soon drive me from the garden). I have a backlog of draft posts to clear out. I’ve been waiting to post until after making these changes and am anxious to start again.

I apologize for any technical inconvenience of the switchover (new blog, new name, new theme, new categories and new hosting).

I want to say thanks to those who actually read my ramblings.

Thanks.

The new features in 1.5 are nice. I notice a few little navigation extras in the templates. The admin area seems like an improvement. I like the dashboard.

The comment moderation process has improved from miserable to annoying. I think it may now be easier to dispatch spam within WordPress instead of phpMyAdmin, which I was using with 1.2. The ‘Check Past Comments against moderation list’ is a great idea, except it doesn’t pay attention to comments that have already been manually approved. Now if only there were a ‘Check Past Comments against Blacklist’ option. An ‘Add This Url to Black List’ command would be useful on the comment moderation page. It would also be helpful to have a note on why a particular comment ended up in the moderation list for debugging false positives. Oh well, there are probably plugins for all of these things.

I started to play around with a custom theme. The theme system is very nice. I think the CSS in the default theme for 1.5 is easier to understand that the CSS in 1.2. If you visited the site this afternoon, you might have caught a glimpse of various themes, including my custom theme. Unfortunately, I found that many of the downloadable themes don’t display correctly on Safari, my default browser. This is not uncommon to run across small blogs that don’t layout correctly in Safari. My problem is the opposite. My CSS never works right in IE/Win. I hate that CSS is so finicky and requires so much manual testing.

Still no built in preview capability for comments.

I’ve been waiting for the official 1.5 release for a while and overall, 1.5 is very much worth the wait.

This won’t stop comment spam any more than spam filters stop email spam. The economics are still on the spammers side. This may have devalued the pot of gold to a pot of silver, but there will still be prospectors. Spammers will only get more sophisticated with their automated programs and the spam they leave.

I think pings and trackbacks tend to conserve PR in the blogosphere[1]. Devaluing these may devalue some of the PR power of blogs in general. I am not sure this is going to benefit bloggers all that much in the long term.

I think the big benefactors of this are the search engines. The SERPS will improve somewhat as the “involuntary votes” get cleaned out.

Also, I think google will probably ignore this attribute on internal links to prevent SEO PR funneling. This probably means there are probably some new opportunities for blackhat SEO by controlling how PR is passed between networks of sites. I bet a bunch of reciprocal link checking software is getting worked on today to check for this attribute.

[1] Am I the only one who hates the term blogosphere?

Henry Copeland, owner of blogAds.com, said some of the bloggers he represents make $120,000 (U.S.) a year from ads — though he won’t say how many — and that “dozens” make $1,000 a month

So it seems like there is a couple of bucks to be made on advertising on the top tier blogs. I have to wonder, though, if the ad revenue instapundit and other political oriented blogs will take a dive once the election season is over. A bubble?

I have to say that I really dislike the scrolling table on the order form for blogads. Scrollbars within windows are hard to use. The table doesn’t reflow depending on window size. I’m sure it looks and works great maximized in 800 X 600 Internet Explorer on windows XP. In 1152 X 864 Safari on Mac OS X, the scrolling is a pain and the big white empty area is a waste.

This order form has the look and feel of desktop development and not of web development. I wonder if some “internet infused” desktop oriented tool was used to make it? Can anyone identify any tool forensics?

I fully understand why John Lim has announced a posting hiatus. I’ll miss reading his blog for a while.

To show how far behind I am, I just added Marcus Baker’s blog to my feed aggregator today: Last Craft blog. The entries so far have been thoughtful and well written. I’ll have more comments later. (No, Marcus, I’m not dead )

Harry brings good news about artima’s PHP Buzz aggregated PHP news feed. I know Harry has wanted this for a while.

This is a lesson in how not to handle public relations. The first story was a technical story of interest to a limited number of geeks about how friendster managed to improve their service for their users. Sure it publicized that friendster was slow, but only in the context of having fixed the problem. It didn’t reveal anything that wasn’t public knowledge, except that the friendster programmers were competent and that they had tried many things to make the site faster.

Now friendster has ironically managed to turn this story into one of general interest to a larger group of socially well connected people accompanied by a call to action to unsubscribe from Friendster. Bloggers do seem to like to blog about blogging. Its already being covered by blogs that would never dream of talking about the scalability merits of PHP and Java. Its #3 on daypop as I write this and it hasn’t been on slashdot yet.