E-Media Tidbits

"Deep linking," the practice of websites linking to articles "inside" other websites, is for the most part an accepted practice now. While a few news publishers have challenged the practice in the past -- wanting online users to visit their homepages rather than inside webpages first, and trying to use the courts to mandate that -- the courts have pretty much scotched those challenges. Deep linking is OK.

But what about deep linking to classified advertising? That's the latest wrinkle, and we'll have to wait and see if deep linking into, say, a newspaper website's specific classified ads passes muster.

Take a look at the new search service Oodle, which aggregates classified ads from various sources -- from Craigslist city sites, to newspaper online classifieds, to vertical classifieds sites like Monster.com (jobs) and Cars.com, to auction giant eBay, and more.

This looks to be truly useful to the consumer. Looking for a new bicycle? Oodle (once it covers more than a few markets) will show you classified ads for bikes for sale in your market area from multiple classifieds databases. (Think of using Oodle to look for ads as equivalent to using Dogpile, a Web search engine that performs searches on multiple search engines and aggregates the results, rather than a single search service like Google.)

Oodle will make money from others' ads, by placing Google AdSense contextual text ads alongside the lists of found classified ads. Future revenue models for Oodle may include upselling enhanced listings to make them more prominent, according to this article in ClickZ.

So, will publishers challenges services like Oodle? The company's CEO says newspapers shouldn't be threatened, because Oodle brings traffic to their classifieds. But knowing new-media history, I bet a publisher or two will file challenges.

But a development in Israel suggests that might not go well. The Tel Aviv District Court recently held that a commercial website that copies employment listings from the classified ads of leading Israeli newspapers does not violate any copyright held by the newspapers. The copyright for the ads belongs to the advertisers, not the newspapers, the court ruled. It is in the benefit of the advertisers, of course, to get wider distribution of their ads.