Ruk is famous – for a day
Wow is Peter naive or playing coy. “but I think their motives are pure.”
The Ghiz government don’t want the heat.
Richard Brown wanted to interrogate civil servants during the Polar hearings but now wants to protect them. Yeah sure, we’ve got a gold watch for $10.
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Graphic takes note of Ruk’s blues
Ruk’s post
OpenCorporations Day in the Media
I’ve spent a good part of the day fielding calls from reporters about OpenCorporations.org and the changes that have led me to plan its demise — so far I’ve done phone interviews with The Guardian, the Globe and Mail and CBC Radio and I just finished taping a TV interview for Compass. Some points I’ve tried to make in those conversations:
* Search engines (like Google and Yahoo) index the pages on the Internet by having “robots” that visit all of the pages on the Internet: so Google can tell me where to go for pink ice cream cake because its robot visited this page and this page and this page — and 296,000 others — and found the words “pink ice cream cake” on them and added these words to its index.
* OpenCorporations.org has its own “search robot” that does exactly the same thing, albeit with the robot trained only on the Corporate Register pages.
* There was no robots.txt limitation on the Government of PEI webserver that prevented search engines from indexing the Corporate Register. There still isn’t. That’s where I took my “it’s okay if you index this content” cue.
* For years Google, and other search spiders, have been indexing PEI corporations data: here’s a Google search for ‘Homburg’ that shows this in action. So the changes not only shut off the tap for OpenCorporations, but also for the rest of the web.
* It’s completely within Government’s right to control the indexing of resources on their website and, even if it were possible, I wouldn’t try to circumvent the restrictions they’ve put in place, which clearly telegraph a “don’t index this” intent.
* Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy legislation was not written to anticipate mashups like OpenCorporations: it’s an open question as to whether Government has a duty anticipate and act against potential remixing. I think the project was valuable if only for the focus it put on issues like this.
* I don’t think that Government acted with the aim of hiding anything, or preventing the lid from blowing off anything: I think they were forced to make an impromptu policy decision based on sudden focus on an unanticipated use of new technology; I happen to think they made the wrong policy decision, but I think their motives are pure.
If nothing else I’ve discovered through this experience that if you create a useful tool that’s especially useful for journalists, they will be especially interested if you have to shut it down. I happen to think that’s a good thing: and I’ve been generally impressed with the journalistic understanding of the subtleties of the story.
