Googalipettes
From the RSS feed of Aaron Swartz I was reading this post within NetNewsWire when I decided to continue reading directly on his site. But the paragraph I was about to start reading had just gone! Here it is, right after "I checked my email and found out I had a meeting with a fellow at Google, so I left and went to look for Glenn who would drive with me there":
From Google the news was mixed. He said he wouldn't start indexing .0 URIs, which includes the URIs for all our licenses. He also said that he wouldn't parse RDF for at least six months, since it required involved changes to their system and added overhead (which you need to keep down when parsing 3B pages). However, he did say that if we added meta tags for license information, they'd add a new search key like link: or inurl: right away, since they already had a meta tag parser. He also suggested adding something to robots.txt to indicate the license for a specific directory. He said that robots.txt was designed to be extensible (ignore directives you don't understand) and that Google had already extended it.
It doesn't make sense just yet -- although I think this has something to do with Creative Commons licenses -- but it will after some sleep :)
Still on Google, while I was dreaming about the potential of weblogs and a good search appliance (thinking of the Googlebox), my friend Patrick had came out with the logical conclusion of a Google appliance mixing both Blogger and the Google search engine. Brilliant. If only Google would consider selling those to Europe (er, it's been more than a year and their search appliance is still unavailable on this side of the Atlantic).
And yet another sneaky thing about the Google API terms of use:
you may not use the search results provided by the Google Web APIs service with an existing product or service that competes with products or services offered by Google
So, now that they absorbed Pyra and its Blogger service, what does this mean for other weblog systems, like Movable Type, which make use of the Google API?
