United Features Realizes That Setting Comics Free Online Makes Sense
from the about-time dept
For years, the big comic strip syndicators tried to pretend they could recreate a world of scarcities online. They tried to hide comic strips behind registration walls and make it difficult to regularly view them. RSS was completely out in some cases -- especially if that RSS included the actual strip. This was backwards, as something like RSS for comic strips is a perfect example of what the technology was designed to do. For many years, one of the most popular RSS feeds online was a scraped unauthorized version of Dilbert. All of this artificial scarcity and fear over openness actually allowed many webcomics to become quite popular in place of the professionally syndicated comics. Finally, earlier this year, United Features, which syndicates Dilbert, revamped the entire Dilbert.com site and added a real RSS feed.It appears that United Features is taking that even further, freeing up all of its comic strips online, including vast archives, and is adding full RSS feeds for all of them. This includes 50 years (and 20,000 strips) of Peanuts. You can even create your own custom feed of comics that you like. United Features is probably about five years late in getting around to this, but better late than never.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: comic strips, openness, peanuts
Companies: united features
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
-bowerbird
[ link to this | view in chronology ]