(Sorry if you don't like the "web 2.0" label—I needed that kind of shorthand label for my title, but it's not too necessary for the rest of this post.)

One feature of the iCite net is that the same contents can live in multiple places but share a single identity. This means that, for example, the same blog post can live at many URLs on the web (on many websites), but, in the iCite net, also be clearly identified as the exact same post.

While that might sound far out (in the sense that this feature of the iCite net is not available yet), it has long been common for resources on the web to be mirrored or cited in whole in multiple places. And, with RSS/Atom and other data-oriented forms of publishing, there is a more and more viable mechanism and permissiveness for copying the contents of one site to many others on the web.

One thing weighing heavily on many folks' minds is how the duplication of one's site contents can be surreptitiously used by another to garner search engine traffic and/or sell advertising. There are a number of issues there in terms of copyright, commercial vs non-commercial usage, personal vs public usage, and just general rip-off and manipulation. Many of these are discussed in the comments to Dave Winer's post, How to allow subscription but not syndication?, and in the thread NoIndex, again initiated by Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma on the Atom syntax mailing list.

But, as a general context, one underlying problem is in the way current search engines work with site contents copied across multiple URLs, namely that the engines don't (and/or can't) properly account for the contents' origin.

Search engines like Google tend to be treated as if they are part of the infrastructure of the web (because none of us wants a web without them—so fair enough, in some sense). But, these engines aren't in the commons infrastructure of the web—they are commercial enterprises trying to capitalize on their strengths and being self-protective against web-practices that highlight their weaknesses.

So, with regards to duplicating site contents, on one side, search engines look to penalize sites that duplicate. And, on the other side, publishers look to enforce license restrictions that will keep duplicates out of the search engines.

But, I think we'd have a different dynamic if the search engines would themselves clearly indicate attribution and list origin sites in a primary position while including duplicate sites only in a secondary position. In other words, we could imagine a search engine that capitalizes on the value in duplication (e.g., part of why this page is authoritative is that its contents are copied by many others) rather than tries to eliminate it.

As I've written about many times in this blog, the ongoing development of web service interfaces (APIs) and web data formats encourages more and more websites that remix and repurpose the contents of other sites into new uses. And, I think we should look to search engines to more seriously adapt to that rather than look to cripple what we're doing to offset current search engine weaknesses with regards to this evolution.