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The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Times puffery

8 comments on Times puffery

Times puffery

: Can’t believe the puff piece The Times gave to Amplify, a service that lets you cut and paste pieces of sites onto a proprietary page format and share it. First, this has been tried a half-dozen times before with absolutely no success; no mention of that. Second, this is an invitation to violating copyright: People can copy pieces of your site and call it theirs. This, from reading The Times story, it appears that the elements aren’t actually stored on the “amp” but are direct-linked (that is, if you put a popular photo on your site, these amps, it seems, call the photo from your server without going to your page with your name and brand and advertising and so you get all the bandwidth costs and none of the glory).

Naive editing.

If Circuits editors read Rafat Ali and Steve Rubel, they would have at least provided a few “buts” in the story.

8 responses to “Times puffery”

  1. Dexter Westbrook Avatar
    Dexter Westbrook

    Well, if Rafat Ali and Steve Rubel are to be believed, the Amplify service stinks anyway and is destined to fail. Nothin’ to worry about.
    Saying that Amplify is “an invitation to violate copyright” is a pretty good description of the entire Web. It’s like saying water is an invitation to get wet.

  2. Bob Avatar
    Bob

    I don’t get your concern: you could do the same with a screen capture right now or simply save as to your hard drive and reopen in Dreamweaver . . . I missing something?

  3. Bill Peschel Avatar
    Bill Peschel

    Amplify allows them to do it wholesale. Yes, you could go to my site and take my copy, my photos, my blog comments, but that’s a lot of work (for such small gain, too). They make it easy to take content and publish it under your own name.
    Reread the last few sentences in Jeff’s paragraph. Amp doesn’t copy the content onto their servers, it is called from your server. If an Amp user takes a picture off my page, then anytime his page loads, I supply the picture. My bandwidth is being used by someone else without payment. That’s stealing.
    But I’m not worried. The Amp pages look ludricrious. I wouldn’t waste my time there.

  4. Jon Avatar
    Jon

    I just opened an Amp and the source url appears in every frame. I also read the copyright policy and publishers can opt to have Amplify block their content from being amped. So I’m not so sure I agree with Jeff on this one.
    Blogs look ludicrous too, no? How long did it take blogs to be accepted and become mainstream?
    j

  5. Andrea Harris Avatar
    Andrea Harris

    It looks as if the makers of “Amp” have decided to exploit the ignorance of people who don’t know how to use Google and “save as.” A lot of these people are going to be very upset when “their” pictures all turn into goatse.cx.

  6. Michael Zimmer Avatar
    Michael Zimmer

    The Circuits section of the NYT is just “Sunday Styles” for techies – its nothing but 6 pages of paid placement, dressed-up press releases and “Wired”-esque techno utopianism. To expect anything other than a “puff piece” is wishful thinking.

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