Archive for August, 2002
August 16, 2002
Membership Directories and Copyright
The American Massage Therapy Association was unsuccessful in a lawsuit against a publisher who had copied the contents of the AMTA membership directory for their own commercial purposes. Courts have held for a quite a while that the contents of a telephone directory are not copyrightable and the judge held the same standard here.
I think this will drive more associations to switch to web-based membership directories and cease publication of print versions (not to mention the cost savings). It is just too easy to give a printed directory to a temp for a few days of data-entry. Voila! A new spam/direct mail list!
Web-based directories can be structured in a way that makes it much more difficult to copy member contact data in bulk yet still facilitate individual networking. This could help reduce the risk of member data being used by outside parties in unintended ways.
Here are a few methods to protect member data in a web-based membership directory:
- Put the directory in a restricted-access, members-only area of your web site.
- Limit the number of results shown at one time in a search results set.
- Only show partial contact info (such as name, city and state) in the search results list.
- Display full contact information one member at a time.
- Do not allow browsing of the complete alphabetical list of members.
This may not stop the truly determined but it will make it much more difficult to copy the entire membership list.
Depending upon implementation, some of these methods could limit the usefulness of the directory for members. You will have to balance that against the need to make that data available to members in a form that won’t easily be abused.
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August 14, 2002
BlogTree
Lots of people have written about www.blogtree.com which allows you to indicate what blogs inspired the creation of your own. I finally got around to setting up my record here.
I was honored to see that someone flagged the KMpings blogtree record as a parent/inspiriation for a book review repository they started using TrackBack.
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August 14, 2002
Radio Docs for Klogs
John Robb has written some documentation for knowledge webloggers using Radio who are just getting started. This is definitely a piece that needed to be written. Another that they need to write (and it looks like John is working on it) is a deployment white paper on how to set up klog network using the Userland tools.
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August 8, 2002
Referral House Keeping
I have dropped the referral script from most of my templates due to some javascript errors it was creating under certain conditions (thanks for pointing it out Brian!). I think I know what to fix but it will have to wait until the weekend most likely.
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August 8, 2002
New KMpings Posters
Welcome and thanks for participating to James Robertson and Anders Jacobsen who have recently begun sending KM-related TrackBack pings to KMpings!
Be sure to check out Blogpopuli for a similar site that tracks entries related to blogging (plenty to track around that topic).
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August 8, 2002
Ray Ozzie on Public vs. Private Space
Ray Ozzie has published an essay on why he works in the collaborative software market. Below is an exceprt where he points out the tension between private space and open space sharing:
Of course, blogs are (and the theory behind klogs is, I believe) at the complete opposite end of the spectrum - being “make public by default”. By choosing to work “in the open”, others surely can benefit from work that “should” be published. And let there be no doubt: if you can get people to work in the open, it can be quite valuable to others so long as people broadly understand what should be shared and what shouldn’t.
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August 6, 2002
Stupid Linking Policies Blog
I love this blog: Don’t Link to Us!. They link to stupid linking policies around the web. I noticed at least one mention of an association.
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August 6, 2002
AOL Rediscovers the User
New Software (and Bosses) at AOL is a great article on the NYT web site today. It discusses how the revamped leadership of the company is moving back to being user-centric in their approach to business as opposed to investor-centric. Here is a snippet about their plans to reduce pop-up ads:
The worst fears of Mr. Leonsis and his colleagues became evident late last year as AOL’s monthly surveys found member satisfaction starting to dip. Mr. Leonsis formed a task force to look at why members were canceling their service. It zeroed in on pop-up advertisements, a longtime feature and to many a longtime annoyance. As revenue began to fall last year, AOL had increased the frequency of pop-ups, and members began to complain louder than usual.
A study showed that when the number of pop-up ads was cut in half for a group of members, their satisfaction improved notably. That led not only to a cutback in the number of pop-ups across the service, but was, according to Mr. Leonsis, the catalyst for a revolution within AOL.
The article also indicates they are trying to refocus on the supporting the community of AOL users. Sounds like they are coming back to reality.
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