On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
It's hard to understand the conjecture that Wikipedia ties in with those plans. If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news
articles
would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old articles, which can generate advertising revenue from old news that would otherwise be valueless.
You could say the same thing about goggle search, yet some of these organizations are claiming that google search is ripping them off for linking to them (and not just the google news headline scraping).
It's complicated. The advertising income these kinds of sites get is strongly driven by keeping users within their garden. When someone pops into their site grabs only the information they need the paper makes a lot less money then if the users hang out. Compare to the standard grocer's practice of putting common goods (like milk) at the back of the store.
True. Which is one reason why it would make intuitive sense for webmasters
to restructure incoming links from Wikipedia as entry points to their sites.
It ought to be feasible for news site webmasters to design a functionality around certain keywords in historic articles, so that visitors are directed to other stories from that news source about the same subject. That would be quite useful and keep readers within their garden.
For instance, the two NYTimes links for operat soprano Mignon Nevada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignon_Nevada
One NYTimes source is a PDF hosting that goes nowhere; the other is a 1909 review for one of her performances. Advertisements and links fill the screen, but none is remotely related to Mignon Nevada's career or to opera or to Ireland, where she performed on that occasion. A large banner trumpets a Consumer Reports sweepstakes. A sidebar links to Blackberry ad, flu treatments, a health care firm, career opportunities, and home value estimates. Then another ad section for financial advice, health care, and weight loss. This is completely untargeted. The average reader skims the one paragraph of useful information and then flees. They'd have a better chance of keeping my attention if they linked to other articles about that opera--or at the very least to ads for the New York Metropolitan Opera and Irish vacation spots.
-Durova