Printed Matters

It turns out Gatehouse wasn’t suing the New York Times over deep linking or even linking. As Gatehouse president Kirk Davis said:

You’ve got to be kidding me. What do you think, we’re stupid? Of course we like linking and of course we support linking.

Instead, the concern seems to be the use of the headline and lead paragraph of Gatehouse stories to form the links.

Some people are saying that this comes down to a fair use issue. I highly doubt this, as I said before when I was talking about a similar lawsuit by AP against Drudge Retort. It is fair use to reprint small snippets and headlines from stories on competing websites.

That is not the point I think Gatehouse has. Maybe Gatehouse doesn’t know the point it has. Or maybe they share my vision of how aggregators should work.

I think it is entirely correct to suggest that link aggregation is not done properly if it is done by an automated method such as scraping or via RSS feeds. That’s because the headline and lead from the other site are usually the worst things you could possibly use to get people to click the links. The headline is often some clever witticism that doesn’t tell you why you should read the story. The lead, while it may set up the story and draw you in once you’re there, doesn’t usually have enough utility to get somebody to click the link.

Every link and accompanying blurb should be hand-crafted to maximize the utility to the reader and also the reader’s chances of clicking on the link.

Reductio: a link is useless if nobody clicks the link. The web is built on links; links are the essence of the web. The usefulness of the web is increased the more links there are. Ergo, a link should always be crafted with the intent of maximizing the number of people who click on it.

If you want to talk about a link economy you have to be talking about effective links. Effective links are ones that people want to click. Two points here: first, most of the good information in a typical news story is in the lead, so if you give away the lead there might not be any reason to click through; second, the headline and lead might not tell the reader the most important things about the story he’ll be clicking to – how it advances the story, what it will add to the reader’s knowledge of the topic, how it differs from other stories the reader may have already read.

Principle: maximize utility for the reader.

Principle: the better you are at sending readers away, the more likely they are to return. Because they’ll get that nice feeling: “Every time I come here I learn something, I’m well-served, and I feel smart.”

Now, more than likely, Gatehouse is just feeling put out by a competitor making money from its content with little or no effort. “Jesus,” you can hear someone at Gatehouse saying. “We put out these RSS feeds and the competition goes ahead and uses them to make money on our backs. Why don’t we just give them all our money?”

But maybe, just maybe, they are visionaries.

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