Monthly Archives: March 2011

This report which suggests the Dept of Finance was overruled by cabinet when they warned of potential problems in the economy isn’t really a surprise.

McCreevy, Cowen and Lenihan – men who knew better. Certainly the first two, all you had to do to be popular then was give the unions what they wanted, lower taxes, increase spending on fuck knows what (we’ve got some ok roads now, I suppose) and you were the man. THE MAN.

What was interesting though, as I read it, was that it seemed familiar to me. And then I remembered I’d heard the story, practically word for word, on the 2pm news bulletin on Newstalk. I realise stories can break with little or no time to re-write but still. Maybe they’ve changed it since.

I do wonder about the world of content scraping though. News is automatically deemed information in the public domain, so publication X can spend time, money and effort breaking a story and then publication Y comes along, republishes it with some vague acknowledgement of where it came from, and that’s apparently ok these days. It’s enough to build a business on.

Many times the acknowledgement comes only in text form – e.g a website will say ‘In an interview with Publication X’, and even though Publication X has a website, and may even have a page on their website with that very story, no link is created. I know of bloggers who have broken stories, had them scraped by large publications, national newspapers etc, and the attribution can range from none at all to completely incorrect.

Luckily for me I don’t have any content that people want to scrape – apart from one sad cunt on Myspace that time – but I can understand why others get very, very frustrated at those who do.