Khichdee is a famous Indian delicacy, containing a combination of various pulses, spices and curries. Khichdee.com is, in a way, a mixture of classifieds that have already been published either online or offline. These classifieds have been re-organized and parameterized into categories and are presented to viewers in an easy-to-search format.

For ages now, classifieds have been successfully used by the world, for announcing their intentions to buy or sell a commodity or service. Local newspapers have always thrived on this service of classified listings and many have survived and grown on the revenues generated by classifieds.

In the past few years, classifieds have gone online and have outperformed the local newspapers. More and more people are now putting up their goods / services for sale on on-line classifieds. An increasing number of buyers are now looking for products and services online rather than browsing through a set of local news publications, owing to the fact that online search is faster and has the natural advantages of database querying.

Khichdee.com attempts to take this phenomenon, one step further. With khichdee.com, the attempt is to bring all the classifieds that are published on-line or offline at one place. So as a buyer, you get the entire set of classifieds published online for your preferred product or service in your preferred city, at one place. This reduces the bother of browsing and navigating through a large number of websites, newspapers and magazines. As a seller, you get probably, the largest number of buyers interested in your product or service not just from your city, but from across the globe. As a publisher of online classifieds, you get added traffic because Khichdee also publishes the URL where the ad appeared originally.

http://www.khichdee.com

But there is also a big philosophical difference between Google Base and ROR. Unlike ROR, Google will not share that huge amount of data with the rest of the Web (search engines, applications, etc); Google wants you to submit it directly to them, they’ll even host your data for free, if needed. It’s as if the only way to submit a website to Google was to upload all the pages stored on your computer, instead of just submitting the URL. This 180-degree turn is alarming to say the least, especially coming from Google. Could this approach mean that soon searching Google will really mean, well, searching Google Base, not the Internet? Hmmm!

- RORweb.com

Yahoo Mail Beta blows GMail and Oodle.com blows GoogleBase. Google Talk works but SkypeOut is better. Is Google a search only company. Where’s Google Finance?

Did everyone read the recent I, Cringely article.

Maybe in the future people will just go to Google, which will present them with a content rich page. Text taken from one site, images from another site and a video clip from another and there will be tiny links back to the originating sites which hardly anyone clicks on, because they get most of what they need from the composite page at Google?

It seems to me this is the way things are going.

This started with images. With some search engines presenting ‘thumbnails’ that were only slightly smaller than the original image. Once this is the case, there is no need for the surfer to visit the original site to view the image.

The same applies to videos in FireAnt. Where are the URLs back to the site where the video came from? It seems that every effort is made to prevent the surfer from visiting the original site. This is pretty much ‘hotlinking’, which used to be frowned upon with images but apparently is OK now. In fact, with videos it is even worse due to the huge amount of bandwidth they consume. It is also very difficult to prevent hotlinking to videos through htaccess etc.

If you are creating content for free, then it doesn’t matter, as you are only concerned with maximum distribution and as many people seeing your content as possible. However, if you are trying to earn a living, then your opportunities for making money are limited. You can put ads on your site pages. Currently there is pretty much no way to earn from an image or video that is deliberately separated (’hot-linked’) from your site.

No site visits and no ad income = no money to pay the bills or live on, no site anymore and no more content…

The bottom line is that companies such as Google and FireAnt aim to be the ones who profit from content, rather than the original creator. They make the money from my content and I don’t.

I have a huge amount of high-quality written content, photographs and video material that I could put on the web. But it is my livelihood and pension for the future and the monetary return is not there.

If Google is going to catalogue my content and then regurgitate it, with the minimum amount of reference to my website — which is my only means of earning from that content, then there is no point me making it available. And, what with the danger of content being stolen and shared, I am really better off keeping it all under lock in key in the hope that sometime in the future there will be a better opportunity.

Someone may have pointed this out already, but it’s Bill Burnham. You said Brad. You’re right about it being a good post though — I think he’s right.

Statements like this assume that Google is the same company it was when started by the PhD dropouts in 1998 - now it has shareholders it needs to satisfy, and keeping things proprietary will always be better for the bottom line…