This was signposted back in February and launched a week or so ago. Crikey has a polite review with relevant background.
It's an interesting experiment, but the real reason for posting today is that I just noticed a reasonably significant feature on the Australian Defamer site. Back in February Paul Montgomery raised the obvious question about a licensing exercise like this: why wouldn't you just go straight to the original?
Well, guess what? You can't. The link to the "US edition" at the top of the Australian page points straight back to the same (Australian) page. What's more, type the URL to the US edition straight into your browser and you bounce right back to defamer.com.au.
Are they paranoid? Or shall we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a mistake? I've emailed the editor and we'll see what she says.
Meanwhile, Gizmodo, the Australian partner site to Defamer, doesn't feel the need to restrict its readers from accessing the US edition.
Weirdness.
Update: Redirect quietly corrected
Well, no reply from the editor but strangely enough the re-direct has been fixed. (And no, it wasn't my imagination in the first place. I tested it on two machines.) So, how about that? Let's assume it was an innocent mistake and not an attempt to keep Australian audiences from going straight to the source.
Now we can all see how much copy is being duplicated.
2 comments:
or maybe they had a problem for a little while ... wow ... not unusual in online launches!!!!
Yep, maybe. An innocent mistake. Interesting, though. A one-line reply to my email would have laid it to rest. Though the lack of response doesn't necessarily mean anything. It's interesting, though ...
The original question remains - why wouldn't you go directly to the source for this sort of material?
Now that little problem is fixed, you can.
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