Finding Blogs by License Type
sj is looking for blogs with particular kinds of licenses and wonders if there’s an easy way to do it. If license types were included as a tag in the feed, perhaps a search mechanism, like Google, Technorati, or Feedster, could help someone find blogs with certains kinds of licenses.
Distributing licensing rights with the feeds could be valuable and useful for any number of reasons.
Many of the blogs on Harvard’s server have Creative Commons licenses because people have to manually change the license if they want something else. If they don’t know how to make that change, which is often the case, it’s difficult for them to change the rights on their blog.
(Something’s wrong with the feed on my blog and a few other Harvard blogs. I was going to check the feed to make sure I’m not typing about something that’s already happening, but I get an error message instead of seeing the XML. If I remember correctly, there isn’t an attribute for rights that’s distributed with the feed from my blog. Managing editors of Harvard-hosted blogs can’t edit their feeds, so it’s not something I can change.
Of the feeds I subscribe to that I checked, only a few had any sort of rights notations and one of them used a Dublin Core metadata tag to include a copyright notice.)
August 9th, 2004 at 1:44 am
And then there are /some/ blogs which don’t mention anything at all about their license… alas.
August 9th, 2004 at 12:45 pm
Yes, some people may not realize the importance of making those statements. Other people, perhaps, have not given it enough thought to know what kind of rights they’d like to have to what they’ve created and what kinds of rights they’d like to give to others.
And, of course, there’s the technical problem I mentioned in my blog post that some people don’t know how to edit their template or blog to know how to put some kind of rights statement on it.