I'm sorry that you mistook my description of the task difficulty as meaning that I wouldn't do something complicated. Like you said, I'm a PhD student, which incidentally means that I have many other demands on my time and do many difficult things every day.
"What if I wrote a program that would let people republish your research in full without your prior consent"
Nirmal that readability service is incredible. I tried it on my blog - I hate to admit it, but it does look a lot better. One thing that makes it much easier to read is that it strips out the comments. I am not sure how I feel about this, but I suspect for 80% of readers (and likely many of the people who use the bookmarklet) the comments are just noise.
Similarly stripping the navigation also makes it easier to read, but then it loses it's value as a website.
I wonder if there is a readability wordpress plugin that could display the readability version in a JS pop-up overlay. I think if I can find one, I'll add that to my site.
Edit: I just tried it on DaringFireball. Beautiful.
Well the traditional approach is to contact them and secure their permission. But as you alluded, that doesn't scale.
So perhaps there's a startup opportunity here, for a system that secures permission from people who are ok with their content being reproduced without their prior consent.
Perhaps there could be a service that creates a list of web sites where the content is licensed Creative Commons. Then, if someone was going to create a web app like this, they could filter that list against their web app to only include sites that have been licensed creative commons.
Comments
I'm sorry that you mistook my description of the task difficulty as meaning that I wouldn't do something complicated. Like you said, I'm a PhD student, which incidentally means that I have many other demands on my time and do many difficult things every day.
"What if I wrote a program that would let people republish your research in full without your prior consent"
Do it.
Incidentally, my hack isn't the original Readability service. My inspiration is http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Nirmal that readability service is incredible. I tried it on my blog - I hate to admit it, but it does look a lot better. One thing that makes it much easier to read is that it strips out the comments. I am not sure how I feel about this, but I suspect for 80% of readers (and likely many of the people who use the bookmarklet) the comments are just noise.
Similarly stripping the navigation also makes it easier to read, but then it loses it's value as a website.
I wonder if there is a readability wordpress plugin that could display the readability version in a JS pop-up overlay. I think if I can find one, I'll add that to my site.
Edit: I just tried it on DaringFireball. Beautiful.
That's not the point, though.
You may be ok with it, but what about all the other folks out there? Checking with each of them would be the right thing to do, but complicated.
The culture of lifting original information and data regardless of the wishes of the original creator is a bad thing.
Let's make this a constructive debate. Do you have any thoughts on a system that could be developed to secure permissions of the original creator?
Well the traditional approach is to contact them and secure their permission. But as you alluded, that doesn't scale.
So perhaps there's a startup opportunity here, for a system that secures permission from people who are ok with their content being reproduced without their prior consent.
Perhaps there could be a service that creates a list of web sites where the content is licensed Creative Commons. Then, if someone was going to create a web app like this, they could filter that list against their web app to only include sites that have been licensed creative commons.