The Irish Times schizophrenic attitude to blogs
I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but am I alone in thinking that the Irish Times has a very schizophrenic attitude to blogging?
On one hand, it’s one of the key players ushering blogging into the mainstream, with writers such as John Collins bringing the read-write web to the attention of a wider audience (not to mention their coverage of the blog awards). I presume John is freelance , a distinction that will become important in the next paragraph.
On the other hand, some time back I asked for a link from their ‘blogs‘ page. I expected more of a ‘who do you think you are, we have 100,000+ daily readers, and you have exactly how many?’
Instead I got this strange reply…
You can place a link from your website to ours, but we request that you
include a credit to ireland.com/The Irish Times and a link to our home
page at: http://www.ireland.com/
Further information on copyright is available at
http://www.ireland.com/about/copyright/We do not currently provide a page from which we link to other sites.
Thank you for your interest in ireland.com
Fair enough about not linking to me. But telling me exactly how I should link to you is a bit 90’s.
Which is a pity as if they took the same approach as another publisher (O’Reilly books) they could get some great user generated content, and be a real hub for the masses of Irish non-bloggers.
Update: John Collins has just let out the news that Ireland.com now has several bloggers on it. They even let you post comments.
Spoke to a very nice girl from ireland.com at the SMW2007 conference. This actually came up. It’s down to concerns over litigation I believe (not quoting her). But then again at least they have RSS feeds, which is more than can be said about their Irish brethren. Did you notice that unison.ie now display Adsense?
Richard,
I can understand the concerns over litigation, but surely O’Reilly have the same issue? And they are US based , where the situation if anything is worse.
Kudos to the Irish Times for the RSS feeds , and their coverage of the blogsphere in general. Just couldn’t understand (before now) the ‘we might let you link to us’ attitude.
Paul
If you think that’s bad, I found out that the Irish Cancer Society requires you to fax them for permission to link to them. Needless to say I didn’t, and they’ve now got a lot more links from the blogosphere too
Donncha,
I think you should follow their lead and disable all outward links in Wordpress.
Paul
OMFG they have got to be joking? I dont normally curse, but what they have on this page (and notice I’m using my chosen anchor) makes them look like complete morons. They do absolutely trojan work but someone needs to have a chat with them about how the Internet works.
Too busy to blog, but good lord, I might just find the time now.
I’d like to know when the document was written. I suspect that it’s more than 7 years old.
Paul