Online ad agency on blocking search engines

Addvantage Media partners question the soundness of newspapers' thinking in blocking search engines, and give an informative update on the issues we face.

How Murdoch isn risking reducing traffice to his own sites

Tim Berners-Lee on the Right to Link .... from way back as 1997

Myths are dispelled in this quite revealing piece of internet history started by Tim Berners-Lee in 1997. It puts the current debates in perspective.

We tend to forget that search engines - which are what enable us to find interesting web content that we might want to link to in the first place - predate the internet as we know it today . Search engines have evolved in DNA-like fashion from the days of lists maintained by people like Tim Berners-Lee on CERN, to early programs like Archie, the first search program written by a student and Gopher  (1991, even I remember that, I hate to admit!) to all the variants we now know today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

What the newspapers are doing is tantamount to blocking the lifeblood of the Internet. It is like deliberately introducing thrombosis in an otherwise healthy organism.

Linking Not Stealing Content

This is an IT journalist's persepctive on why search engines and aggregators are not stealing content.  It gives enough technical background of what search engines and aggregators actually do without boggling the mind of internet users who just want to create, forward and follow links in the way the internet was designed to allow.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/daveyw/2010/01/09/murdoch-cuts-off-news-nose-to-spite-face/

An Informed Exposition of the Issues by a PR Professional

This is written from the point of view of the PR industry, but the issues of the way old media are coping with the new e-economy landscape has much wider implications to the end users of search engines and news aggregrators - all businesses, organisations and individuals.

NLA vs the World

Fox News Sued For Copyright Infringement; Complaint Mocks Murdoch's Comments On 'Stealing' Content

The double standard of arguments against linking have been exposed as Fox argues fair use in exactly the same way search engines and news aggregators argue for fair use.  Here's the story.