Good Writing Wants to be Read

Boy,
reading the New
York Times Tough Shit Op-Ed pieces by their "big
guns" Kristoff, Dowd, Herbert and Friedman for free keeps getting harder
and harder. Decent writers, all, but hardly worth the price of the
paper
alone
on the
days you
don’t
have
time or energy to read more than a couple of columns.

When the Times first went over to a Premium Subscriber pay-to-read model
they were decried as uncaring corporate capitalists. For a few days,
in a show of insolence and solidarity, half the blogosphere was reprinting
the password protected columnists en masse. Some
sites prominently published all
of the restricted content – but now no longer do so. Burnout or back
down?

The easiest way to find the column you wanted was to subscribe to the
RSS
feed for the New York Times Opinion list, and then copy the titles
of the articles you wanted to read and paste them into the search field
of Technorati. For a few months
there the top ten searches (prominently displayed at the top of the main
Technorati page) were peppered with "Maureen Dowd" and "Nicholas
Kristoff" and the titles of that day’s Premium Content.

Suddenly, when we got back from our trip abroad, this was no longer
true.
 Had people lost interest, or were the search results being manipulated?
A Technorati search for one of today’s authors "Paul
Krugman",
leads only to sites which reprint PART of the column and then link to
the New York Times members-only site. Have the Gray Lady’s Lawyers been
sending cease and desist love letters to the Technorati brain trust?

A more functional alternative today seems to be Google’s new Blog
Search, which looks
relatively unmoderated. A search for "Do
You Know What They Know" (the
title of today’s Herbert column ) leads to 5 complete reprints of the
entire column on different blogs among the top results.  It seems
that the full reprinters are still out there, but smaller and more occasional
targets.
Go Google!
Slay that gray dragon.

Of course, the Google Blog Search is still a beta service, so maybe
the Times legal department will get to them before the final version
is released.
So enjoy it in the meantime – we did to uncover the following succinct
sentence from the abovementioned Herbert column.

The Bush administration, by exploiting
the very real fear of terrorism, and
with
the connivance
of
Republican
majorities
in
both
houses
of Congress,
has run roughshod over constitutional guarantees that had long
been taken for granted.

read the WHOLE piece at Free Democracy