For quite a few years Club Troppo has had a self-appointed mission to bring the best of blogosphere writing to a wider audience. There’s a lot of rich, diverse, high quality material out there, much more so than in the mainstream “print” media, degraded as it is by competitive pressures in a convergent media world and a resulting drive for the lowest common denominator of taste and intellect.
However, at least for a casual reader, it’s hard to locate the quality material in the mountain of opinionated drivel unleashed by the miracle of free, universally accessible Internet publication. That’s we we ran the Best Blog Posts annual feature in conjunction with Online Opinion for a number of years, not to mention the Missing Link feature which has now morphed into Twitter feeds run by Ken Parish, Nicholas Gruen and Don Arthur. All these feature human-curated blog reading selections. We take the time that many readers just can’t afford (in my case through frequent insomniac tendencies) to find quality material.
Our new Best From Elsewhere feature takes this philosophy a step further. We will be featuring continually updated republished selections of the best blogosphere writing in the top banner feature slider.
Update – The feature slider is broken right now, so Best From Elsewhere is on temporary hold. Hopefully the slider will be fixed some time tomorrow (Monday 18 June).
I have long loved Troppo and have a lot of respect for what the contributors of this site do, but I think this is misguided.
Opt-out content scraping, despite the best of intentions, feels unethical to me.
By all means seek to reprint posts from elsewhere. But please get permission in advance.
I read everything at Troppo but very rarely comment – but on this issue I think feedback is important.
They are excerpts only which encourage people to go and read the articles (except OpenDemocracy which expressly allows and encourages non-commercial republication of its articles). Publication of excerpts/quotes from articles is a ubiquitous practice, and is relevantly indistinguishable from the Missing Link publication we ran for some years.. When I first uploaded them they were complete articles but I’ve adopted Rob Corr’s suggestion to go for excerpts only. That isn’t “content scraping” on any view.
Thanks Ken – excerpts are fine. My comment was prompted by seeing the full articles being republished this morning.
A wonderful addition – thanks :))