Abierto vs. Cerrado

To anyone who hadn't guessed, that's Espa±ol for open vs. closed. Here's a fascinating post at SiliconBeat about the brewing debate, ignited in part by the Craigslist objection to Oodle's scraping.

I had a conversation about the whole thing with Healthline's Tony Gentile the other day on why Indeed (jobs aggregator) is OK and Oodle is not from Craigslist's point of view. He thought it might be the feed (Indeed) vs. scraping (Oodle) method of content acquisition.

And here's an entirely different and very interesting take on the issue from "Perry" (Evans?) in response to my earlier "Smackdown" post (scroll to 3):

I€™m not sure this is a simple just €œwhat€™s best for consumers€. The underlying €œcontract€ with the consumer that supplies the content, and the publishing mission and model of the aggregators are very important, imho.

CraigsList has won an admirable trusted position with the consumer, in part on the assumption of a community which is understood and proven to not violate some (mysterious!) €œorder of things€ that has controbuted to their amazing success. Craig should rightly be careful to sort out its (implied or real) contract with its users, and it€™s up to €œhim€ to gauge the terms by which those community covenants are assimilated across the net . . .