This is a post about freedom. The freedom to keep your data for yourself and the freedom to run free software. You should be able to reclaim and enjoy these freedoms also when using web applications.

Someone says it’s spooky, others call it weird, creepy, hilarious, …

I’m talking about the kid site released few months ago by the NSA. The “CryptoKids” are cartoon animals each with a passion for a different aspect of cryptography: Crypto Cat is a cryptographer making codes out of everything, Decipher Dog is a codebreaker, Slate is a bunny that loves math and so on. There are tons of games and activities to entertain and educate.

Robert MacManus write

Uber classifieds site craigslist has requested that Oodle, a classifieds ‘meta’ search engine, refrain from scraping its content.

Oodle did not understand why Craigslist is requesting this non-sense, but politely Oodle satisfied the request.

We are no longer adding new Craigslist listings to our index. […] We are working to understand and address their concerns. As of last month, about 80% of our listings came from sources other than Craigslist. Without them, we still have about 4.5M active classified listings and that number will continue to climb by the millions in the coming months. […] Oodle makes this process less painful and helps consumers to be more successful. And if you’re in the business of publishing classifieds, this is a good thing.

Oodle’s work is just to spider, index and show snippets of classified ads. It’s just a specialized search engine. Google could launch a similar service with not a lot of efforts (and there are rumours about this here and here). Google could have a scraping strategy (as they did for Google News) or redefine the whole market creating a new marketplace for classifieds. I don’t think that this can be avoided using lawyers.

This kind of lawsuits are terrible threats to our future. A future that could be as beautiful as suggested by this very interesting post by Henry Story in his Sun BabelFish Blog

By making your database available through a SPARQL end point you are allowing software engineers to create very powerful apps from your data that may in different ways help grow your business. This is what Web 2 is all about.

I feel this is the new battleground. It’s not about fair use, copyrights and other 19th century ideas. It’s about making sense of whole Internet.