Put Yer Money Where Yer Mouth Is

This is a super special blog entry to address a spat that is occurring between some former classmates of mine, including Cari and Noor and some current students/alumni from SI. Some current students and alumni from SI are building an unofficial or semi-official knowledge base known as siClops by aggregating the RSS feeds of SI related blogs, including those from current students and alumni. Now this in itself is not controversial. It is that they have aggreated Cari's, Noor's, and other people's blogs without asking their permission first. Usually when people add people to their blog rolls, there is some sort of understood code that it is okay since you know that person so how or are affiliated with them. Plus in order to find a specific person's blog from other blog rolls, it often requires some amount of work to find out their connection with each other. However, most blogs are generally publicly available so that it is easier of people who know you to find you with the understanding that complete strangers are usually not trolling the web looking for random blogs to read. There are blogs that are restricted access, mostly out of privacy concerns of the author. However if you do not have access to a restricted blog, getting access is usually a pain and degrades the user experience. Many people enable RSS so their readers can be alerted when a new entry is posted. This is where the heart of the spat lies.

The siClops people are aggregate using the RSS feeds supplied by the blog authors thus allowing their content to show up on the siClops site. Cari, Noor, and many others object to this because they were not asked permission beforehand, since it is their content they are aggregating. The siClops defend themselves by saying RSS feeds are public, therefore they do not need to ask for permission. Simply by enabling RSS, they are giving tacit permission to siClops to aggreate their blog. Also the siClops are saying they are providing a valuable service to the SI community by providing exposure to content by alumni that would be of value and interest to current students, faculty and others. Their response to those who do not want to be aggregated is that they should disable RSS and restrict their content to only those they wish.

Where do I stand on all this? First off, I would like to state that my blog is not aggregated on siClops because my RSS feed is apparently "invalid" which is news to me since many of people that read my blog usually get it through RSS. I, along with several other alumni, are not included in siClops, which by their logic, means that they do not consider us part of the SI community or our content is not worth providing to a larger audience. Remember, their logic is that by being a SI alumni and having RSS enabled, you are essentially saying that siClops can take our content and provide it to whatever audience they hope to serve without our permission. Well I am a SI alumni and I have a more or less working RSS feed. So do others who are not included in siClops. If siClops purports itself to a SI information grounds. Well it doesn't include me nor does it include many other SI alumni's blogs which are pretty easily accessible from ones they have already chosen to aggregate. So I guess we non-includes aren't part of the SI information grounds, so if their audience is the SI community, that kinda hurts. It is a smack in the face by non-inclusion. The former Dean of SI, John King, shook my hand and said, "We're really going to miss you." at graduation. Apparently the purported SI community information grounds, siClops, doesn't think that way. It doesn't think that way about all the alumni it chooses to leave out.

But what about Noor's and Cari's problem with not being able to opt-out of SIclops (the exact opposite of my feeling, I can't opt-in apparently)? Well technically and probably legally, the siClops people are in the clear. RSS feeds are public. And since they are public, accessible to anyone who can find them, then yeah technically and probably legally the siClops can do whatever they want with them. But that doesn't make it "right" in my opinion. In my opinion, siClops is the same thing as a spammer. Spammers regularly sent out crawlers to websites looking for people who have HTML coded their email address into their pages so they can send spam to them about penis enhancements or money making schemes from Nigeria. The spammer defense is that the email addresses were publicly availabile (even though their availability was only made possible by a web crawler). They also defend themselves by saying they are providing a valuable service by saying their spam could be more products and services of interest to the people they spam (nearly 99.9 percent of the time it is not). And they also go on to say that people who don't want spam should'nt be putting out their email addresses on the web then (and therefore not allowing people who they do want to be able to contact them to find their email address - yes I know many have now displayed their email addresss in images to stop this very practice). Basically these are the same arguments the siClops have used to justify their taking of RSS feeds without permission. Spam is technically legal but it is annoying. I guess I could say the same thing about siClops.

It does not look like the siClops have any intention of changing their ways. So this is what I propose. SiClops is entirely dependent on the content provided by its contributors (those who have agreed or those who have not). Yet I see only one of team members of siClops who actually has a blog that is aggregated and available. Why don't these people but their money where their mouth is. They should put their own blogs up and make them available to siClops. If they don't have a blog, they should start one. All the people they have aggregated (with our without their permission) are contributing to make siClops a valuable resource. They should contribute to or should just shut the hell down. They should also send a blanket message to any and all members of the SI community (students, alumni, employers, faculty, associated faculty, members of the business/non profit community, partners) that if they do want to opt-in, they can contact siClops to add them into the aggregator. This will prevent the diss by non-inclusion and also lead to a more comprehensive and more complete information grounds/base (if that is the purpose of siClops). It is time to put up or shut down. I would be happy with either.