> On Thu, Apr 22, 1999 at 04:47:09PM +0100, David R. Newman wrote:
>
> > > On 16 Apr 99, at 20:15, Martin Hamilton wrote:
> >
> > > > One thing we can't do, BTW, is redirect people to different
content -
> > > > e.g. send them to HENSA rather than webtechs.com. That's expressly
> > > > forbidden by the SLA, and has its own set of legal problems :-)
> >
> > Unfortunately, that appears to prevent the HENSA cache being used a
prime
> > social science research tool, on which we could all book time like
> > astronomers book time on telescopes. It would be really useful if we
could
> > prepend, once every 10,000 pages returned, a single-question form at the
> > top of the page returned.
...
> Whilst I can see the attraction in doing this, I personally don't like
> the idea at all.
>
> Essentially forcing people to take part in a set of research projects
> (no matter how worthy) wouldn't seem to fit the way in which academic
> research is normally carried out.
Chris, Dave and Martin raise some interesting issues concerning the ethics
of the use of proxies to provide value-added / alternative services. These
would include:
o Redirection / filtering "undesirable" content (porn, ads, etc.) - as we
know, a legal nightmare.
o Delivery of alternative versions of resources (different formats,
languages, etc.)
o Reformatting to support specialist clients (e.g. PDAs, Nokia, etc.)
o Enhanced performance (e.g. HTTP/NG)
o Value-added services, such as clever bookmarks, what-related links, etc.
o Research applications, such as David's suggestion.
Various examples of each of these applications are available.
I think it would be useful to explore the implications more fully.
Is "spamming" the main objection? This shouldn't be a problem if the user
has to opt-in.
Is copyright the problem (adding a link to a questionnaire may be construed
to be altering the content of a document)?
Brian
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