WAN 2008: 'Drive-by' critics will not stop ACAP, says WAN President

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'Drive-by shootings' from bloggers should not deter publishers from implementing ACAP , Gavin O’Reilly, the president of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) said today.

The Automated Content Access Protocol, which aims to give publishers greater control over the use of their content by search engines, had received criticism from the blogosphere, O’Reilly told delegates at WAN’s annual conference .

However, criticism from publishers had come from outside of WAN, he said.

"We have had a lot of drive-by shootings from bloggers, because it doesn’t suit their å la carte notion of the world," O’Reilly told delegates at WAN’s annual conference.

"We welcome criticism: this [setting up ACAP] has been open and collaborative from the start."

His admission was prompted by a publisher in the audience, who urged others to read the criticisms of the project before implementing the protocol. Google has previously refused to adopt the standard despite participating with other search engines in working groups on the scheme.

The search giant said the existing robots.txt protocol was sufficient for publishers online.

"They [search engines] are involved, but they are not officially signed up. That is not surprising if you consider that up to this point they have had unbridled use of our content," O’Reilly said today.

"The status quo has suited them; it hasn’t suited many publishers."

The protocol, he added, will not succeed without the involvement of the ‘big three’ search engines - Yahoo, MSN and Google - and all publishers.

“Ultimately for ACAP to work we need the involvement of the search engines. How can we get the search engines to recognise ACAP if we don’t have every publisher on side?”