September 25, 2006 | posted by Michael Baxter in Uncategorized |

Consider, for a moment, “deep linking.” It’s a term used to describe a hyperlink to a specific page within a website, that takes the reader directly to an item of content, circumventing the home page. It is not popular with all publishers.

They want visitors to their website to come via their home page, and view lots of their ads before finally reading the article they are really interested in. Google, on the other hand, with its Google News service, deep links like there’s no such thing as a home page. For the end user, it’s great. If there’s something they are specifically interested in they can view a host of articles from a variety of sources, all lined up on top of each other. But for the publishers it’s not so good. At its most extreme, such a service could lead to a loss of brand identity for some publishers, with editorial becoming a commodity. On the other hand, it allows the reader complete choice, and enables them to cherry pick the articles they read, from anywhere in the world.

Yet, maybe in the long term it’s not so good for the public. If publishers lose their identity in a sea of readily accessible editorial, ordered, not by the newspaper’s editor, but rather by a computer, profit could be transferred from the owners of the copyright to the search engine companies, with a resulting loss in the quality of editorial available.

And as traditional publishers struggle to eek out their living from advertising, search booms.

Now, publishers have clubbed together to develop a tagging system for encoding editorial with instructions for use by search engines. The tag will form the lynch pin of a new licence publishers want to implement called Automated Content Access Protocol.

For its part, Google insists what it’s doing is entirely consistent with copyright law, and that in any case it’s increasing the amount of visitors to a web site by providing links.

But last week, the company was dealt a potential blow to this position,. It lost a legal case in Belgium, and is now forbidden from running snippets of news on its website taken from Belgian papers.

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