October 14, 2005

Craig's List Wants "Scraping" to Stop

Looks like the battle over scraping is now getting heated up. FYI, scraping, is the practice of basically "site eating" someone else's hard earned data in order to developer your own application based on their data... essentially, thinking of it as ripping off someone else's data! According to this blog (http://battellemedia.com/archives/001930.php) Craig's List has asked that oodle (http://www.oodle.com/) stop scraping their data and quite frankly, you can't blame Craig's list at all.. check out Oodle... they are merely re-packaging Craig's list and other classifieds for their own self-serving profit! Go get em Craig! No doubt the whole issue of scraping is going to be huge moving forward, particularly as google mashups, map hacking and other practices are based primarily on scraping other DBs... keep in mind though, many very useful hacks are based on publicly available data sources and thus are fair game and a welcome addition.
 

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