> On 1/26/07, Mike Hudack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I think that defaulting to opt-out would make our > negotiations harder, > > and I also think that a good number of people who wouldn't > object to > > syndication to, say, AOL, would never opt in simply because > it takes > > effort to do so. > > What do opting -in and -out mean, Mike?
Search engines have robots.txt. Video aggregators have the MediaRSS restriction standard. What we're doing is asking aggregators to respect MediaRSS restrictions, and then giving users control over those restrictions. It's much like what you suggested in terms of mod_rewrite / some form of server-side access control, only done at a higher level and more scalable + easier to manage. All we're doing is taking a level of control which is already available for pure HTML pages and applying it to media. > About the issue of advertising on player pages, that doesn't > make sense to me in the case of aggregators which link to > rather than re-host media files. I don't think the content > creator has any claim over whether third parties do > advertising unless the third party is hosting a copy of the > media. And frankly, that's a good thing because being unable > to advertise would decimate the aggregator business and the > lack of aggregators would make decentralized citizen media a > non-starter. Only centralized sites like YouTube and blip.tv > would be able to survive. My goal here is to facilitate the creation of a world of carrier-neutral destination sites like Y! Video, MeeVee, Mefeedia and many others. As I pointed out in my summary of the meeting with Magnify, their business is heavily advertising-dependent, and we understand and respect that. Right now it looks like everyone is okay with them inserting copious advertising in the discovery experience, but not everyone is okay with advertising inserted in the consumption experience. This is the inverse of what they're doing right now. Given that, I'm not suggesting that we ban them from aggregating blip.tv video, but rather that we allow content creators to make the choice as to whether or not they'd like their content displayed in that environment. Surely this is a good thing? Keep in mind that in terms of centralization, blip.tv is behind YouTube. It's in our best interests to encourage a huge crop of carrier-neutral aggregators which, with content from hosting sites like blip, can take down YT. Our interests are aligned here. > About respecting Media RSS claims and providing a link back, > there's an implicit assumption that the aggregator discovered > the media via some particular source. If the aggregator just > has a bare URL, which often happens, these conditions aren't > possible. In my experience it is often hard or impossible to > connect a media URL to the original source page, and for a > popular URL it is hard or impossible to figure out which of > multiple sources was the original one. For example, > Akamaized media can only rarely be traced back to the original source. I acknowledge that it can sometimes be difficult to track back metadata about a video if it's given to you as a bare URL or such. Agreed. The cases we're talking about here aren't WebJay, though. We're talking about Web-based aggregators that slurp giant RSS feeds. They're not offering the kind of functionality WebJay offers, they're instead building huge video repositories for search and discovery. I agree that a WebJay shouldn't be held to the same standard as a Y! Video or a Magnify. So you can (rightly) press me on what the difference is. I'd argue that the difference is actual human interaction on the level of a specific video. If a human being goes in and creates a playlist out of a bunch of different pieces of media then that's a different case than if a company scrapes up every media-laden RSS feed it can find and makes them available in a destination site surrounded by tons of branding, advertising and lacking any kind of credit to the original content creator. Digg shouldn't be held to robots.txt, but Google should be. Agreed? > Companies the size of Yahoo are the only players who can > even get into this game, so I suppose I should be happy to > have barriers to entry, but I don't think it's right to keep > startups out. I call bullshit on that. Peter did this with Mefeedia on zero budget. If I weren't so busy on blip.tv I would whip up a quick little aggregator in Ruby or PHP or perl or something in a few hours that respects MediaRSS exclusion just to prove my point. I'm betting that the very basic proof of concept could be done in under 25 lines. A quick HTTP GET, slurp the results directly into an XML parser, and then a little xpath. You'd just need maybe five lines of logic for determining whether or not you're actually allowed to redisplay the media. The logic itself is described perfectly well in the MediaRSS spec, found here: http://search.yahoo.com/mrss Yours, Mike
