loudspeaker - 6:39 am on Sep 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

I agree with the paragraph above - take a look at what Google is doing with local restaurant reviews (admittedly without blatant monetization, but give it some time!). Type in a name of a restaurant in a major metro area (on maps.google.com), then click "more info" next to the restaurant name and see all those snippets, photos, quotes and reviews pulled from different sites.

Honestly, I feel sorry for all those suckers who actually went there, ate, wrote reviews, took photos. In short, worked. The result of their work is all there for the taking (as snippets and small images, sure) and I don't even see that much of a need to click onto the sites to see complete reviews. Snippets are probably going to work for 75% of people.

I am not blaming Google for taking advantage of this (if they didn't do it, somebody else would), but sometimes I feel the content authors should rebel against this practice in general. No, robots.txt is not the way to rebel (you'll only hurt yourself by losing traffic). Something else must be invented, but I don't know what.