In his latest Buzzmachine post, Jeff Jarvis minces nothing on the Associated Press' attempts to fend off use of its material online by others: You're the problem, you homogenized the content, and now that you can't take advantage of the link economy, you're suggesting you're Don Quixote.
He ridicules the AP's plan to establish a portal. He suggests that, rather than attack bloggers who repurpose its content, AP should be part of a solution that links to original content --- as should aggregators and search engines. Rather than fight the Internet, why not use technology to feature the original work most prominently?
He goes on at length and suggest the AP is the enemy of the newspaper, which offers original work and watches it rewritten and redistributed.
I would suggest that AP was the original participant in a link economy in a pre-Internet age, in that it worked as a cooperative to do what Jarvis suggests: do what you do best, link to the rest. Only, in the AP era, it wasn't a link, but a throw --- a technical distribution of that content to some paper far away that couldn't gather the information for itself. It's a different era now.
