Joey deVilla points to the announcement that his wife, Wendy Koslow, is the Editor-In-Chief for Top 10 Sources.

Maybe I'm bitter that my site, improvident lackwit, was not included in The Simpsons subsite (okay not really: I haven't written there since October of last year), but it seems a little too old-school for my liking.

The URLs have the unnecessary "Default.aspx" in them, not to mention the redundant "TopTenSources". I'm not really sure how I feel with subdomains with the word 'the' or dashes/hyphens in them either. Links to external sites, which appear at the bottom of each sub-site, aren't really links. They point to individual external weblog articles (it actually looks like they're taking in anything topical that has RSS, which is smart), of which there are excerpts, aren't really links: they're Javascript pop-up windows. This is bad because users should control what goes into a new window, and pop-ups break the back button. Javascript links are bad because search engines won't follow the links and get all the good that inbound links get.

It feels old-school because it feels like About.com but instead of the individual articles from editors, they appear to be OPML files—∂fmeaning you should be able to, in the near future, subscribe to one feed and follow along with what the editor of a subject reads, unsubscribing as the editor unsubscribed. Evidently user-submitted content will be accepted for publication on the site in the future. How cool would a site of user-contributed reader lists be—moderated 'up' or 'down' using a voting scheme much like Kuro5hin uses for individual articles—with comments and collaborative tagging. It's nice that it says I don't need to sign up for an account to enjoy the site, but what if I wanted to? If building a community around your site is an important goal for your site, you enable that feature on day one.

All that said, this raises important issues about copyright. After noting that publishers, including bloggers, retain automatic copyright to their content, John Palfrey discusses “the concept of implied license: why, after all, would someone in fact offer an RSS feed if they did not want to be included in aggregators?” (Palfrey has been directly involved with Top 10 Sources.) Actually no: very few people now choose to publish RSS feeds. Their software does it automatically for them, regardless of their choice. Every publishing software that does it automatically eventually gets a feature request for an 'feeds off' button.

I also don't think that since only 1% of people with feeds listed have requested to be removed that this is grounds for concluding that a norm has been established. This is a lack of evidence, not evidence of lacking. We come up across people from LiveJournal who get their posts indexed by Google because it appears on Urban Vancouver "without their consent" because they mention the word "Yaletown" and get picked up in a PubSub feed. (Note that LiveJournal users typically think of it in terms of violating their privacy, not copyright.) I submit that most people in our aggregator would be surprised they had their entire sites republished. Put simply: there is no implied license because you publish an RSS feed. Publishers, bloggers included, automatically retain copyright regardless of whether their content appears in an XML file.

After two years of working with Urban Vancouver</a/> in its aggregator, which syndicates posts from Vancouver-based bloggers, I keep wondering whether we should be doing it. Embedding copyright in the feeds will not solve the problem of copyright and its enforcement—or lack thereof—not because this there will be a few that have incorrect licenses, but because copyright is a legal problem, not (only) a technical one.