Mashups:
Following up on some of the things I've posted recently, here's a bit more on the Washington Post's mashup page where they post news of new and interesting ways to access or use Post stories, particularly the NewsCloud.

I linked to it on my Herald blog the other day, too, and got an email from the creator alerting me to a bad URL. After I answered saying how interesting it all is, Frank Wiles informed me that the NewsCloud wasn't created by the Post, but by him, on his site, Revsys.com. It uses the Post's RSS feeds, and you'll run across other versions of NewsCloud (see Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion site, for example).

One thing that occurs to me is that news organizations, and news librarians, are protective of their stories and their copyright. We're constantly on the alert for sites using our stories, fearing that having them out in the open will affect our bottom line, damaging revenues from LexisNexis and the like.

The new view of news product says that the more you make it available the better your visibility, respectability, and influence. It all goes back to the old debate about whether you have to charge for news, lock it inside an archive, or put it all on your site for free.

So it's interesting to see the Post linking to this. And why not?