The curious case of BlogBabel
BlogBabel, for those not in the know, was an Italian blog indexing and ranking service. To all intents and purposes it was similar to a system like Technorati, or the Italian service BlogItalia.
Anyway, BlogBabel’s relatively harmless indexing and ranking managed to raise the hackles on a few Italian bloggers’ backs, and as a result the service is (temporarily?!) no more.
Apparently what happened, and you can read a post about this on Fabio Turel’s Digital Self blog, was that BlogBabel decided to change the way it decided Italian blogs rankings, and this is where the trouble started.
Grumbling Italian bloggers started complaining about intellectual property right infringement on the grounds that BlogBabel used RSS feeds to reproduce content that was not licenced for commercial use, the blighters. I mean, if you don’t want to spread you blogging word, don’t use RSS. Personally, if I found my posts turning upon up on some big-gun site, I’d be chuffed with the extra traffic and the last thing I’d think about would be to accuse the site owners of stealing my intellectual property.
After the complaints, one thing led to another and the whole thing then went downhill and those that operated BlogBabel decided to pull the plug on their service.
It all sounds like a bit of a storm in a teacup if you ask me. And very petty too.
How about if us bloggers of the world unite and we bring a class action against Technorati, Google, and anyone else who is helping us generate exposure and traffic, and claim ‘compensation’ for the use of our content?
At least we’d all have the pleasure of seeing a judge laughing, as he kicked the whole daft case out of court.
Then again, you never know.
Finnicky, some of these Italobloggers. No?
I would say they’re more than finicky, Alex. I would say they’re “touched in the head”, to use an old US hillbilly phrase.
Is this typical of the internet scene in Italy? Seems as soon as someone wants to provide a service that may actually help a few people, along comes a bunch of naysayers who proceed to go ballistic and torpedo the whole idea.
There is something weirdly self-defeating about Italian attitudes. On the one hand, this is a country that produces such great creativity and beauty… on the other hand, it seems almost impossible to organize anything new — except maybe a new political party.
I wonder if Beppe Grillo himself was one of the complainers who scuttled this service on IP grounds.
This Joe, to quote you:
“There is something weirdly self-defeating about Italian attitudes.”
…sums it up very well. Question is why?
How you ever noticed how extremely creative people are also rather eccentric?!
It’s a funny country, and it’s difficult to understand why Italians act as they do – but there are some factors which are consistent: extreme fear of change, fear, envy, conservatism, virtually zero levels of trust, and greed. Not a pretty mix.
Anyway:
“I wonder if Beppe Grillo himself was one of the complainers who scuttled this service on IP grounds.”
Nope, it was Veltrusconi – who was afraid the people would communicate and start to really understand how to correct this country!! I suspect Berlusco will have a go at stamping out certain blogs…
Alex
I saw some of the ruckus play out in the blogbabel (bb) google group. It appears that some bloggers didn’t understand that bb was at least in reality a non-profit and had very unrealistic expectations on bb.
There have been cases of website owners taking Google to court over automatic crawling and repositioning of site content.
This Belgium case in particular comes to mind: http://searchengineland.com/070213-070353.php
- Sean
Hi Sean,
And welcome to my little blog!
Thanks for the link to the Belgian case – very interesting, but not much seems to have come of it.
While it would be great if Google paid me to include my site in its search engine, I doubt it will happen, at least not until Blog from Italy becomes as big as Mediaset
I won’t be holding my breath! And Google could turn round and say ‘If you want to be on Google, you have to pay us.’, and this would kill off quite a few sites. At least until someone said ‘Hey – you don’t need to pay to be in my SE’, in which case many would stop using Google. And this is possibly why Google does not do the (direct) paid inclusion thing.
I guess it is true that Google make money out of content, but then that is what they do, and without some form of income, Google would not exist.
All the best,
Alex
Alex – wonder if someone’s thought of setting up a blog network in Italian, on servers outside the country? Would that enable them to bypass Italian jurisdiction and threats from the political class?
Hi Joe,
I think, after last year’s attempt to gag Italian bloggers, Beppe Grillo thought about moving outside of Italy to blog, but as far as I know nobody has proposed a network housed outside of Italy – even if certain networks, Blogger and WordPress.com are not necessarily on servers in Italy.
I dare say that if it really comes to it, someone could do it -although Italian bloggers would have to blog under pseudonyms to avoid being picked up by the Italian authorities.
Now that Berlusco has got into power, I imagine we’ll see some attempt to shut certain services up – the man does not like criticism and has already had certain comedians and political chat show hosts excluded from TV here.
Under his previous government press freedom in Italy reached an all time low – even the journalists went on strike.
AnnoZero – the Rai 3 political chat show may well be closed down, as it was during Mr B’s last reign…
The thing is, as Sean who posted above will tell you, the Internet still has not penetrated into Italian society (connection costs are high – and Italians on the whole do not appreciate the wonders of the WWW), so if Berlusco really goes for it, he could probably kill the blogging scene, or at least buy off a few people….
Let’s see – the next six months or so are going to be interesting in Italy. And as interesting things catch my eye – I’ll write about them – at least until the anti-blog police catch up with me! Says he being paranoid! Only joking – I hope.
Alex – looking swiftly over his shoulder