[IP] more on editors query
Begin forwarded message:
From: steven cherry <steven@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 26, 2005 9:28:48 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] editors query
The short answer is, no, there's no quick abstracting tool.
As to the question of fair use and whole articles, versus snippets,
my own opinion, and not speaking for my employer, is that it is
a fair use. And as a writer, I have to say, I love for my words
to be read - any way they get into people's hands is fine.
That said, when I forward items in our publication that I think would
be of interest to the list, I usually send a snippet. We
prefer that articles be read at our site, not just for the pageview
traffic, but because the articles look better, they read better, they
contain their links to sidebars, and, most importantly, they have any
corrections or changes or forward links we may have added since
publication. If it were just the immediate IP readership,
it would be less of a big deal. But IP is archived widely around
the Web.
For those reasons, snippets are usually better. As it turns out, most
feature stories are written in such a way that while the
first couple of paragraphs don't, as you note, give the right
sense of an article, the first one-sixth or so usually does. In
a Spectrum article, it's usually (not always) everything up to
the first paragraph that has a bold lead-in. Posting those first
paragraphs (it's usually about 10-12 paragraphs, in a full-length
feature story), along with something like [more] or [etc], to
let IP readers know that's not the whole article, might be an
effective good compromise.
Steven
--
Steven Cherry, +1 212-419-7566
Senior Associate Editor
IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave, New York, NY 10016
<s.cherry@xxxxxxxx> <http://www.spectrum.ieee.org>
On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, David Farber wrote:
Sometimes I send complete articles to IP. I get occasional
complaints from IPers about the use of full copyrighted articles
and while I believe it is fair use, I would rather not test the
position IF I had an easy way of getting a brief abstract of the
web page with the url I could send out.
Does anyone know of any browser (MAC based) that can do that for me. ?
just snipping the beginning does not often give any sense of the
article and I just don;'t have the time to compose an abstract.
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