Tampa Tribune Blogger Controversy Gone Mainstream
St.Petersburg Times media columnist Eric Deggans has a summary of the Tampa Tribune controversy.
Tas and I came to the same conclusion as Tommy Duncan. The Tampa Tribune was gathering posts from RSS feeds (Pushing Rope's RSS feed was on the Politics homepage) and posted the content on the web sites. The problem was the Tampa Tribune never asked bloggers for permission. The web site TampaBlab receives permission before posting a bloggers work. The Tribune took posts off of TampaBlab and PR. I have no problem with the Tribune linking to posts. I would have preferred being asked if my posts could be published. I'm sure other PR bloggers feel the same way.
Another problem is no one editing the content the web robot posted on the Tribune. The hysterical results was several raunchy Zencomix strips appeared on the web site. I doubt a family publication wanted a comic strip of Larry Craig searching for Barack Obama's foreskin.
The Tampa Tribune now wants to talk to bloggers about a working partnership. I still haven't received a reply to my invoice.
Labels: blogging, eric deggans, tampa tribune
posted by Michael Hussey @ 3:11 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
"I doubt a family publication wanted a comic strip of Larry Craig searching for Barack Obama's foreskin."
Are you sure? I hear Mark Foley's getting his own radio show, so anything's possible!
Surely you jest about Foley.
No, I am not kidding. The Mind of Mark Foley. Read it and weep.
Any douchebag can get their own radio show, apparently. Well, except me.
And any douchebag can be a web flunkie at the Tampa Trib, setting up feeds on the website and not tell any of their bosses what's going on. I know an organization like Trib has a lot more harddrive space and bandwidth to work with than the rinky-dinky web operations I've run, but as a webmaster, I have to wonder why nobody in the Trib's web dept. was worried about the harddrive space and CPU cycles by running these CRON jobs to mine for and store swaths of blog posts for the Tampa Bay area. Like I mentioned to you on Twitter Michael, Drupal -- the CMS package that powered Loaded Mouth -- had the option to take entire posts from RSS feeds. I turned it on one time without thinking about any of the issues regarding the Trib. I didn't have time to think about them because I shut the feature off a few days later after seeing my database size balloon and my web hosting company ask me why I was using so much of their server's resources.
But I've also worked in, and know many people who have worked in, the IT industry. Many IT professionals are given so much crap to do on a daily basis that I'm surprised they don't have a weekly heart attack. So in the Trib's case, I'm willing to bet that some intern turned on the "Publish RSS Feeds" option for their website, never told anybody, on the overburdened IT workers at Trib hadn't had time to check this -- or even realized it until now. In otherwords, the Trib's mistake is likely an innocent one.
But they've certainly been informed of their mistake now, so I hope they correct it.
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