Maurice says that Google’s new syndication protocol, which I asked about yesterday, is an indication that Google is putting a gate in the wall around its garden to enable queries into its data. That would be good. But what it really should allow is not just queries into but scraping of its data for that data is our data that we put there in services like Google Base. Why do I care about this? So that new services can come along and aggregate distributed posts — classified ads, listings, reviews, whatever — wherever they are on the internet, in blogs, in other still-closed services, or in open blogs. Now that Google is trying to become a repository of our data, that should be open to the world to aggregate and analyze as Google aggregates others’ data. The Golden Rule of the Google Age should be: Scrape unto others as you would have them scrape unto you. I hope that’s what the new syndication protocol does but I’m still not sure.
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