links for 2010-12-21

All of which means I need to have a think about copyright and other issues – the great thing about the internet is the sharing of content and ideas, but when a commercial concern like MyVillage is nicking text and photos from local operators, and then running ads for multinationals alongside that content, then that ruins things. Truncating the RSS feed hasn’t stopped MyVillage, but it means they see less and they don’t seem to be able to use images from the site either. It’s not as if I get much traffic from them anyway – less than 1% of the page views for this site come from their piss-poor pages.

I blog for many reasons, but propping up other people’s business plans isn’t among them.

You can, of course, still search for local businesses and view the results as a list or on a map. But the iPad app adds the option to view the results as a grid of photos. As the success of the food recommendation service Foodspotting has shown, photos – particularly at restaurants – can be a huge factor in making a decision on where to go, and by featuring the photos perhaps both users and businesses will feel more compelled to share more pictures on Yelp.