Open Source Solutions

Clarise and I have created a "Lens" on Squidoo as yet another tool to help support our Open Source Business Intelligence book project. A "lens" is basically a Web2.0 tool to aggregate content about a topic. There has been some controversy about Squidoo, in that it can be used as a feed scrape.

I wondered about that when looking at Squidoo, which in the words of John Battelle, “is either brilliant, or an AdSense honeypot scheme, or both.” I admit, it makes me shudder! In the case of say Yahoo RSS, Google RSS reader or Bloglines, the difference is that readers are making a choice, and deciding well, they want my feed. In the process, the middle men are making money, but its good, because I get readers. In straight up scraping, I get nothing out of it.
-- Om Malik in "Why Bloggers Need Google’s Help?"

Spam type feed scrapers take and publish full content from RSS/RDF/Atom feeds, without attribution or links back to the content creator, and make money off the backs of content creators from this content, usually by ad placement on their pages. Probably not much money. I can sort-of see the concern, though Squidoo provides full attribution and links to the source. One positive and interesting part of the Squidoo business model, is that whatever monies it generates, through ads, Amazon sales, etc, are shared with charities and with the lensmasters, but not with any content creators whose full feeds might be on Squidoo.

One way in which we hope to avoid any semblance of scraping, is by having only our own feeds on the lens, and only providing excerpts, even then. We may ask others if we might provide their feeds on the lens, but will only do so with their permission, and only providing linked headlines or excerpts.

We think that there is an advantage that the lens concept might have as a good resource for us. If we tried to maintain a linkblog for everything related to our subject, like standards (e.g. XMLA for OLAP), tools (e.g. Java Portlets), definitions, other blogs, the companies and communities around a project, etc, it would be huge. The lens might be a better place for it. An OPML list might be good, as well. At any rate, it might make for a good interplay with the blog and wiki and drive traffic to us.

Please visit the OSBI Lens and let us know what you think.