Comments on: Murdoch Paper Blocks UK Aggregator Before Paywall Goes Up

By: Carl Barron

Carl Barron — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:19:45 +0000

Well it’s now Tuesday, 01 June 2010 and no sign of Murdoch’s pay walls as yet in the TimesOnLine. So has Rupert heeded my many warnings as to possible lost revenue streams from advertising, for who will advertise in a Newspaper when it has a very limited audience?

Come on Rupert, you really were doing one of your famous windups weren’t you?

Signed Carl Barron Chairman of agpcuk
http://carl-agpcuk.livejournal.com/
http://www.dorsetvisualguide.co.uk/

By: Carl Barron

Carl Barron — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:25:32 +0000

Anyone would think Murdoch had any news that was worth looking at.

To me it looks like just another ‘Pathetic Attempt’ to drum up interest in the ailing News Corp Business.

Last month Murdoch was moaning about Google saying they were pinching his News, yet if Google took News Corp out of its register, News Corp might fail to exist online.

Do us all a Big ,Big favor Murdoch and keep your so-called News we don’t want it or need it.

As I said before ‘Cut Your Nose Off to Spite Your Face’ please do.

Signed Carl Barron Chairman of agpcuk

http://carl-agpcuk.livejournal.com/

By: Malcolm Coles

Malcolm Coles — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:53:18 +0000

Um, it's blocked crawling not linking. In News Now's case, it requires crawling to link. But there's nothing that stops anyone else linking - of NewsNow ading links manually. The point here, of course, is that NewsNow charges for some of its services - but why should the Times accept its crawler for a paid-for service?

By: LyndonL

LyndonL — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:10:18 +0000

I’m mystified by what is essentially an exercise in semantics and hubris on Murdoch’s part. Whether NewsNow has to “copy” the articles of these sites in order to index them is redundant if they don’t *actually* reproduce that content in full on the NewsNow site. All I’ve ever seen them do is provide the headline and the link to the publication’s website which, in terms of attracting free traffic, is a no-brainer if I’m a publisher of content on the Web.

For me, NewsNow has been an indispensable aggregator of targeted news links (in my case soccer news) for years and I couldn’t begin to calculate how many links to these NLA publications’ sites I have made from their service that I would not have otherwise made. I also can’t remember the last time I read a story on The Times’ site — certainly not since they embargoed NewsNow!

By: steve

steve — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:13:11 +0000

i have no comment on the underlying story, but it’s been snowing in MI for the past several hours which makes that url look like “new snow” vs. “news now” to me!

By: Robert Andrews

Robert Andrews — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:19:13 +0000

@PRGuy, @Brendan – noted (thanks). Corrected and corrected.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:23:32 +0000

Your link goes to a domain squatter – the URL is newsnow.co.uk. Thanks News Corp for the PR, I wouldn’t have heard of NewsNow.co.uk if it wasn’t for this!

By: PR guy

PR guy — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:40:58 +0000

First of all, I think if you did some research you’d find that News International is in fact one of the 8 National publishers who own the NLA.

Second, your comment regarding the irony of the link working from NewsNow’s site shows your complete lack of knowledge regarding this issue. Robots.txt blocks spiders and search engines from ‘crawling’ a website. It has nothing to do with hyperlinks embeded in an article.

Perhaps you should spend a bit more time researching issues before attempting to write about them. This is poor journalism.