Aboutus debate goes on
It would seem the debate about “aboutus” is not going away yet - with AboutUs.org now having a “concerns” page (surely the fact that this is necessary at all should be a big red warning flag to the site owner that he’s doing something wrong…)
But I digress, some other bloggers (notably, AJay, who posted the original write up that brought my attention to things, now has a nice little reply from Ray King - the guy responsible for AboutUs, and Paul O’Flaherty have been lending their voices to the debate)
I still think what he’s doing is wrong, and his responses to the concerns raised are not yet reassuring me. Especially as his privacy policy simply states that it’s being “worked on”. It would probably have been a good idea to get this in place before they started trawling the internet for personal information about website owners.
The general consensus in the discussion on the site itself is that the website should be “opt in”, as “opt-out is so very spammer-like” - and everyone seems to agree that personal information should not be displayed, and it should be possible to get content permanently removed - including the histories - oh and that stealing content in the first place, without the webmasters’ permissions was a mistake.
Eventually I beleive Ray will have to step back and say “Sorry, this was one big mistake on my part” and start from scratch, with an “opt-in” system. I won’t be opting in.
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I think unless there’s a tremendous amount of pressure from the blogosphere that Ray King and Name Intelligence (http://www.nameintelligence.com/) won’t back away from this spammer type behavior.
The really unfortunate thing here is that the whole AboutUs.org fiasco doesn’t appear to be getting the attention it deserves in the blogosphere. A quick search on technorati reveals only 59 links which refer to it, and 4 of them are from me! None of the so-called “A-list” bloggers have picked up and this. Scoble are you listening?
Also, the bottom line here is money. I’m absolutely convinced that this is all about generating the advertising revenue off of millions of wiki page, while doing very little to no actual work.
Yes they wrote a bot that crawls the web, but that’s not exactly rocket science! Then they couple the bot with a free wiki solution! It just screams quick fix. As I said on my blog, if they were really serious about providing a service, this would be a searchable database (not a wiki) with moderated commenting, rating and it would be OPT IN.
The bottom line is money!
Also, I believe we have yet to hear anything from Name Intelligence the co-founding company about this matter!
[...] AboutUs.Org starting to cave in Published August 28th, 2006 in Rants Tags: aboutus.org. Well, AboutUs are clearly listening to concerns (link, link, link, link, link) as they now have a mechanism in place to purge the histories, however it’s not easy to find from the front page of the site. He’s also improved the bot, to limit the amount of information retrieved, and provide a sensible credit. (see the “concerns” page again) - although to get a deletion you have to somehow prove you’re the site owner. Shame he doesn’t require this proof for creation or edits of records. [...]