BuzzMachine: Stewardship v. ownership of our news, money, and society
Tuesday, 16 September 2008, 21:31
Jeff Jarvis is appalled by ACAP: "The most appalling moment at last week’s Online News Association meeting in Washington came when a representative of the World Association of Newspapers showed off a would-be 'standard' for publishers to tell search engines what they may not do."
Saturday, 15 March 2008, 12:19
Comments
Matthew Buckland: "WAN also should be careful. Although it represents a powerful publishing lobby of newspapers and online publishers, the publishing community is anything but united on this issue."
Independent: robots.txt
Thursday, 13 March 2008, 12:53
The Indy has adopted ACAP. But while the old Robots Exclusion Standard commands include a link to a sitemap, the ACAP commands do not.
Update: ACAP explains what’s going on in a detailed e-mail:
The main point to be made in response is that ACAP Version 1.0 extends the functionality already available in ‘robots.txt’ and doesn’t invalidate any of the existing functionality. Indeed, it has already been shown in last year’s tests that the ACAP extensions to REP complement the sitemaps protocol. Macmillan, one of the publishers that collaborated closely on the development and testing of ACAP Version 1.0, makes significant use of sitemaps and they demonstrated in their tests of ACAP Version 1.0 that ACAP policies expressed in REP can be used in conjunction with sitemaps to provide rich metadata to crawlers.
We did consider last year whether or not to use sitemaps to communicate ACAP policies, but the decision was taken only to provide a mechanism for communicating those policies using REP. There are a number of reasons for this. The main reason is that we were advised by our contacts in the search engine community that we needed to make a clear distinction between REP, which is used for policy communication - i.e. telling crawlers what they should or should not do with content - and sitemaps, which is purely informative about the content on a site. Another reason was that REP already provided a mechanism for addressing crawlers by name, whereas sitemaps does not, and it would involve a big change to sitemaps to enable its contents to be addressed to specific crawlers.
However, we are still considering the relationship between sitemaps and ACAP and it is quite likely that we will need to extend ACAP to make the relationship clearer than it currently is. For example, we recognise that there is ambiguity in ACAP Version 1.0 as to what is the status of a Sitemaps field in robots.txt, if the ACAP policy includes a request to crawlers to ignore conventional REP records. This will need to be resolved in the next version of the ACAP technical framework.
In spite of the decision last year not to specify how sitemaps could be used to convey ACAP policies, we have not permanently ruled that out as an option, and we know that Macmillan at least are keen for us to continue to look at this. We have an XML format for ACAP policies available in draft, and it would be a relatively simple matter to show how this might be embedded in sitemaps, should the business case be made for doing
Friday, 25 January 2008, 10:46
Comments
"At the very moment that the music industry has realised that equipping music files with DRM is an expensive and unpopular waste of their money, a group of publishers are trying to retro-fit what can only ever be an unenforceable voluntary code onto the e
Thursday, 24 January 2008, 14:22
Comments
The Telegraph’s head of digital production, Ian Douglas, isn’t impressed with ACAP’s responses to critics (like himself).
Tuesday, 22 January 2008, 10:36
Comments
The group behind the Automated Content Access Protocol has published a set of responses to criticisms it has faced from bloggers since its launch in November.
Thursday, 20 December 2007, 09:21
Comments
"[I]f it’s such a good idea how come there is no ACAP compliant bug on either the WAN web site, nor the World Editors Forum (WEF) site published by WAN or for that matter on the sites of other publisher organizations that have supported the ACAP develop
Monday, 3 December 2007, 16:04
Comments
"Throughout Acap’s documents I found no examples of clear benefits for readers of the websites or increased flexibility of uses for the content or help with making web searches more relevant. The new protocol focuses entirely on the desires of publisher
Monday, 3 December 2007, 00:11
Comments
Martin Belam: "It seems like a weak electronic online DRM - with the vague promise that in the future more ’stuff’ will be published, precisely because you can do less with it."
Friday, 30 November 2007, 11:18
Comments
Danny Sullivan: "Right now, none of the major search engines are supporting ACAP. If you were to use ACAP without ensuring that standard robots.txt or meta robots commands were also included, you’d fail to properly block search engines."
Thursday, 25 October 2007, 17:53
Comments
"A new standard to protect the intellectual property of anyone wishing to make content available on the worldwide web will be unveiled at a conference in New York next month"
Monday, 6 August 2007, 13:27
Comments
Exalead, a French search engine involved in the Quaero project, has joined up with ACAP. Google and Yahoo are no doubt trembling.
