SXSWi 07 Notes: Web Hacks: Good or Evil

The following are my panel notes from SXSW. As I am not the fastest typer I have paraphrased what was said. Should you notice any mistakes please do point them out in the comments for corrections.

Kent Brewster Technology Evangelist, Yahoo!
Sergio Villarreal Pixel Pusher, Slide Inc

What's a web hack

Any nonstandard use of HTML markup.

img center and italics were originally 3rd party hacks. Doing anything after the apge has loaded.

KB:

MAshing up the war.
Screen scraping for peace.
Scraper runs once an hour and I then store a JSON object with all of the data.

SpiffY!Search
Results returned from Y!
Good for restricting search to your site.

JSON is returned from Flickr, Yahoo
Technorati badge via pipes.

SV: This could cause problems due to copyright

Badge any RSS feed with Badger and Pipes.

Predictions.

JSON will be a visible competitor to RSS

Intellectual property is a quiestionable concept.

Suddenly everything is hackable. Now you can grab every RSS feed and mash it up how you want.

Publish the JSON Feed now. Be the next feedburner for JSON
Don't stop writing. A writer is someone who writes an author is someone who has written.

The web hates authors and loves writers. As soon as you stop producing content and start trying to restrict people.

How enforcable is copyright.

SV:
Horse Fisting, people upload loads of vidios of this and pictures of this. This is objectionable content to anyone who's alive.
You can't find porn on YouTube. This is humans manually deleting porn.

KB: There's a group of people that work on deleting and banning accounts that propagate pornography. Mainly soccer Mums. They do a great job.

SV: What's to stop someone building a site that adds ads to contentn via pipes?
KB: Just to clear that up you do have to build a site to show content. Using pipes you don't have a site at the end of the process.

Copyright is dead

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