In a fit of shortsighted kindness, the organizers of Wordcamp San Francisco (a conference/unconference about my favorite headache, Wordpress) have invited++ me to come and speak about Global Voices and how we use Wordpress to do the crazy thing we do.

I’ve heard only great things about past Wordcamps (they’re all over the place, there’s one in Toronto in October and a New York one on the same day!), and I’m deeply honored to be able to represent Global Voices and all the amazing people that make it a reality at the SF meeting. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be, let alone be the one speaking.

If anyone is in the area and into Wordpress you should check it out, if I know you and you’re from SF drop me a line, I’ll be in town for a few days.

As part of my ongoing work for GlobalVoices, I recently designed and coded a GV-like site with the specific goal of covering foreign blog reactions to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, called Voices without Votes. The VwV site is a mix of original posts by GV authors about what people in other countries are saying about the elections and links to foreign posts about the elections along with the first ~50 words as a preview.

Despite what seems like a clearly good motivation and practice, some people have big issues with this, likening it to a pathetic practice called ‘splogging‘ (spam blogging, wikipedia link). In the Wordpress IRC channel (a chatroom, #wordpress on irc.freenode.net) some guys got pretty upset about the idea and I had a debate with them about copyright and aggregation of blogs (aggregation means getting content from varied sources and showing them toghether). This resulted in ‘markr’ posting a lengthy critique of VwV’s aggregation practices on his blog, HERE.

Most of his arguments stem from misconceptions about VwV or about copyright law, but some are sincerely just expressions of his dictatorial attitude towards content. I left the response below as a comment on the post, but am reprinting it here for posterity and for those who read my blog and not his (note: his full response is viewable on his page, only the parts I wanted to respond to are below. Skipped parts are mostly him telling the story i told above).

WARNING: This isn’t for my casual readers. It’s long, detailed, political and there are absolutely no lolcats anywhere to be found.

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