Today: my mini-portal and what I should do with it.
If you haven't seen it, it's just a page where I've gathered a) news feeds, b) weblog feeds, c) and the cover story and picture from CNN.com. Then I have a script which refreshes these feeds every twenty minutes by loading static pages that serve as a cache. I just wanted to make my surfing more convenient by bringing updates to a central location, and like Flutterby! pointed out, to not have to wade through terrible design or interstitials.
Looking at my experiment I realize I've made three assumptions so far:
1) I assume that in the case of the RSS or RDF feeds that this kind of mining is legal. After all, each publisher has gone to the trouble of aggregating their content in these XML files and letting users know the URLs that point to these files.
2) I also assume that mining photos or content from someone else's site without their permission by using an HTTP GET or POST and displaying the result on your site is illegal.
3) Lastly, I assume that mining photos or content from someone else's site without their permission by using an HTTP GET or POST and using the result for personal efforts only (that is, not redistributing the content in any way) is legal.
I don't know if these assumptions are true. Probably. I'm prepared to cease and desist displaying material from any of the parties involved if they ask. However, I would continue to gather the same material for my personal use. And there's the interesting thing...
If I avoid the ads and interstitials, I cannot materially contribute to the revenue of the content provider. I wonder what would happen if it were easy to get online news and avoid the revenue-gathering interruptions? What if someone created a Win32 application that mined the popular content sites (or weblogs that you like) and aggregated all the current news as XML and then transformed it into HTML files and then opened Internet Explorer for you? Seems easy. It could have a timer or set-it-and-forget-it feature. And an option to pass a username and password to subscriber-only sites. And the application could be free or even open-source.
I won't do it. I was just thinking aloud.