Ryan's Journal

I assume Xanga offers RSS feeds to people who pay. They seem to have cut off linking to individual entries within one person's blog from my domain (clicking on anything in the feeds I generate and refactor through Newswire will shove you at the person's guestbook), though if you use a different aggregator for my Xanga feeds, I suspect you'll be able to get through with no problems.

While I can probably get around this easily enough, there's a conundrum for me. I understand Xanga's reaction to feeds generated by people who aren't them, since it sure does seem like it's stealing their business prerogative. I hold to the belief that public information is public information, whether it's a person or a computer using it, so if Xanga has published it, it's fair game. Nonetheless, I'd rather not this become a bother for me, nor do I care to engage in a lengthy technical battle with Xanga, cf. Trillian vs. AOL's protocols (and it just so happens I don't really use those links for anything besides seeing when someone last updated).

I mentioned I had little love for Xanga before. Allow me to elucidate. Services like Xanga and GeoCities are great for starting people into publishing on the web. They're terrible for getting them to explore any further - you are allowed to subscribe to other Xanga user's blogs, but not to anyone else's on the world wide web, nor is anyone else on that wide web allowed to see your content in any other way besides what Xanga determines is right. Don't get trapped in the mini-web that, from here on the outside, they seem determined to get you stuck in. There is a wider, less restrcitive, and more interesting web out there, some of which just happens to not try to make money off of you.

I'd like to hear opinions on the matter: Is it right or wrong to regenerate links to people's public content in a way that they would otherwise need to pay for?

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