The DOBlog

Category: Read/Write Collaboration

  • Newspaper Licensing Ireland–a revisit

    So, late last night I wrote a post about NLI and their link license fee nonsense.

    In that post I decided to focus on the non-compliant behaviour of an organisation setting itself out as being the arbiters of compliance with copyright when it came to the data protection/privacy compliance obligations that they appear to either be unaware of or consciously ignorant of (I presume the latter).

    I clearly stated that I wasn’t going to talk about the economic impact of inbound links to websites from the point of view of driving search engine relevance, getting sites onto the first page of Google, and generally providing a basis for establishing valuation models for on-line advertising.

    It’s not my area of expertise, so I thought it best not to say anything.

    But today I searched for “Newspaper Licensing Ireland” in Google.

    I was pleasantly surprised to see that, apart from content by or directly about Newspaper Licensing Ireland, there were articles by Broadsheet.ie, McGarrSolicitors, and your humble scribe.

    On page 1 of Google. In the top 6 things returned for that search string. In less than 24 hours.

    What made this happen? Links. Lots of loverly links being spread through websites and social media networks like, as I described them last night, the “footnotes on the Internet”.

    This is what helps drive traffic to websites, making them more valuable pieces of virtual real estate within which to place advertising.

    Charging people a fee to put up a sign post to your shop makes no economic sense in the bricks and mortar world. It makes even less sense in online.

    After all, links are more properly called “Universal Resource Locators” (URLs). And in this way they are exactly the same as sign posts. They tell people, uniquely, where to find a particular resource. Just like a footnote in book.

    Will NLI start charging license fees for those as well? If so, I’m fudged completely as my last two books have LOADS of footnotes in them.

  • Setting tone from the Top

    In the rush to adopt new technologies and new ways of working, particularly When an organisation embarks on a change to systems and processes it is often very easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of enthusiasm for the new technology and the promised benefits of new ways of working.

    Nearly 2 years ago I wrote a post on this blog about the adoption of US style internet campaigning and the use of Web2.0 in Irish politics from an information quality perspective. The scorecard wasn’t good from a data quality perspective. The strategy seemed to be “If Obama can get elected using this Internet thingy, then we need to copy what he did”. No attention seemed to have been paid to the simple fact that a “cut and paste” adoption of a pre-canned solution from elsewhere would not necessarily work.

    2 years on I would have thought that some lessons might have been learned. So when Fine Gael announced they’d “stood down” their finegael.ie website in favour of a more interactive presence in the run up to the election I thought I’d take a quick look. While the Information Quality issues with the form were not too bad, the structure and operation of the site raise a number of concerns from a Data Protection perspective.

    Bluntly – when a US election solution provider rolls up in Europe they will find that they literally ain’t in Kansas anymore, particularly with regards to what you must and must not do with regards to the capture and processing of personal data. Political parties buying these services need to be aware that they are Data Controllers and that the solution providers are Data Processors in the context of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003.

    Failure to set the “tone at the top” and cascade it through the organisation means that often the important questions are not asked (or the answers are ignored).

    Ultimately, in a Data Protection context, you are dealing with issues that can impact on your brand. If you are positioning yourself as being a political party that will “get tough” with vested interests through more effective regulation and enforcement you can’t really start the ball rolling by flouting basic principles of Data Protection law.

    Indeed, back as far as 2004 the Data Protection Commissioner wrote:

    It is important that public representatives and candidates for elective office realise the importance of their obligations under the Acts and that, in so far as responding to legitimate investigations from statutory office holders is concerned, in no sense should they consider themselves above the Law

    In 2009’s annual report the Commissioner also wrote that:

    Rapidly changing technology can be both a threat to this right and the means of protecting it. Building data protection safeguards into new technologies and applications of these technologies remains the best approach. This is as much true of data processing in the “cloud” as it is of a routine development of an IT application in an organisation.

    So… the issues? (more…)

  • Imitation the sincerest form of flattery

    I noticed that Informatica have launched a new website called www.doyoutrustyourdata.com, to highlight issues with poor quality information from the media.

    My personal opinion on the site is that it isn’t very nice looking (but then I’m not a big fan of black on green). However, I’m biased as I moderate the IQTrainwrecks.com blog for the IAIDQ which has been doing this for over 2 years now in an occasionally tongue in cheek manner. IQTrainwrecks.com gets reasonably good search returns on google (and we’re looking at ways to improve that further).

    I’m flattered that Informatica have stumbled upon the same idea that the IAIDQ had back in 2006. I hope that we can figure out a way to have both sites working together for the benefit of information consumers everywhere. For example, the IAIDQ would love to reward members for submitting stories to IQTrainwrecks.com but our resources aren’t extensive enough to fund that (yet).

    [Update] As Vincent McBurney correctly points out, the IAIDQ wasn’t the first to try to create a resource like this. IQTrainwrecks is a spiritual descendant of www.dataquality.com and also the listing of issues that Tom Redman has been tracking over on www.navesink.com). [/update]