Reporter Teresa Wright filed a story for today’s Guardian on OpenCorporations.org.

I’ve spent a good part of the day fielding calls from reporters about OpenCorporations.org and the changes that have led me to plan its demise — so far I’ve done phone interviews with The Guardian, the Globe and Mail and CBC Radio and I just finished taping a TV interview for Compass. Some points I’ve tried to make in those conversations:

• Search engines (like Google and Yahoo) index the pages on the Internet by having “robots” that visit all of the pages on the Internet: so Google can tell me where to go for pink ice cream cake because its robot visited this page and this page and this page — and 296,000 others — and found the words “pink ice cream cake” on them and added these words to its index.
• OpenCorporations.org has its own “search robot” that does exactly the same thing, albeit with the robot trained only on the Corporate Register pages.
• There was no robots.txt limitation on the Government of PEI webserver that prevented search engines from indexing the Corporate Register. There still isn’t. That’s where I took my “it’s okay if you index this content” cue.

• For years Google, and other search spiders, have been indexing PEI corporations data: here’s a Google search for ‘Homburg’ that shows this in action. So the changes not only shut off the tap for OpenCorporations, but also for the rest of the web.
• It’s completely within Government’s right to control the indexing of resources on their website and, even if it were possible, I wouldn’t try to circumvent the restrictions they’ve put in place, which clearly telegraph a “don’t index this” intent.
• Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy legislation was not written to anticipate mashups like OpenCorporations: it’s an open question as to whether Government has a duty anticipate and act against potential remixing. I think the project was valuable if only for the focus it put on issues like this.
• I don’t think that Government acted with the aim of hiding anything, or preventing the lid from blowing off anything: I think they were forced to make an impromptu policy decision based on sudden focus on an unanticipated use of new technology; I happen to think they made the wrong policy decision, but I think their motives are pure.

If nothing else I’ve discovered through this experience that if you create a useful tool that’s especially useful for journalists, they will be especially interested if you have to shut it down. I happen to think that’s a good thing: and I’ve been generally impressed with the journalistic understanding of the subtleties of the story.

A User’s Guide to Reykjavík Restaurants: The Vegetarian Edition from Iceland Express, the best airline-that-blogs I’ve encountered.

The Province of PEI has modified its online Corporate Registry so that details of individual corporations are no longer exposed to search engines — there’s a new “are you human” check on the site, with the note:

Details of registrations in the Corporate Registry are available to the public. A security feature of this online service requires a key code authorization. To view details on any specific registration, please enter the key code below.

I will leave it to others to debate the merits of this move on the Province’s part, but the practical result of the change is that I’ll have to shutter the OpenCorporations.org service shortly, as without the ability to spider the Corporate Register the corporations information there, which is already almost three weeks out of date, would soon become unreasonably inaccurate.

I’ll leave OpenCorporations online until mid-week and then shut things down. I’ll continue to make the spider source code, and the raw data spidered on November 19, 2008 available for download.

Over the week that OpenCorporations has been live there have been over 150,000 searches from 2,100 unique visitors, the vast majority of them from Prince Edward Island. On average each visitor visited 46 pages, and spent 10 minutes on the site.

Of somewhat ironic interest, some of the most frequent users of OpenCorporations.org were within the Government of PEI network (3,927 searches), the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission (2,016 searches) and Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (1,057 searches).

Just leaving the Holiday Inn Boston at Beacon Hill to head back to Canada. The hotel was a 3-star get from Hotwire, and if this is typical of 3-star quality there, then I’d stick with 4-star or higher: room door opens only half the time, bathroom door hits the toilet on opening, stains on the chair, dowdy old furniture, lobby that feels like an Econolodge. The pillows are nice, but that’s about all.

A week ago I paid $30 more for a room at the InterContinental and that was a $30 well-spent.

I am now officially a hotel snob.

I thought that Rob’s Boyd Conference was about the world-changing radical ideas of Jane, not John.

Because I know you’re all eager for news of the Monadnock Region of Southern New Hampshire, here’s some things I’ve noticed:

• The old Medicine Shoppe drug store in downtown Peterborough is closing now that the modern new CVS has opened on the outskirts of town on the way to Dublin.
• The Harrisville General Store re-opens on December 12, 2008.
• The Brown House Bakery in Harrisville has mint brownies that will blow your mind.
• If you suddenly find yourself in need of a sport coat because you realize that people are serious about the “business dress” for the Christmas party, JC Penney in Keene is an excellent place to go: variety, price, service all good.
• Still hard to get a cappuccino in a china cup, and not a demi-tasse spoon to be found in the county.
• The Peterborough Community Theatre — the tiny first-run independent movie house in town — is for sale.
• The region has gone roundabout mad.

I lamented the 40% stake in Honest Tea that Coca-Cola acquired earlier in the year. But it’s hard to argue with the upside of the deal: you can now buy Honest Tea everywhere, at least here in the northeast. I’ve seen in in drug stores, gas stations and the general store up the road (you used to be able to find it only in health food and gourmet joints).

You might be under the impression, from reading Local blogger eases immigrant investor searches, that I created OpenCorporations.org to, well, “ease immigrant investor searches.”

If you read my blog post about the service you would realize that this actually isn’t true: I created it in reaction to a specific personal need for information. Something that I told the CBC reporter yesterday during an interview, but that didn’t make it into the web story.

Yes, OpenCorporations.org does “ease immigrant investor searches,” and certainly, after creating the tool I became aware of that (it’s hard to ignore, as the participation in the program was pervasive). I don’t see the ability to search in that regard as being any different than the ability to identify any shareholder or director of any corporation, no matter their origin and reason for investing, so I’ve no issue with the site being used for this purpose. But it’s not why I created it.

Personally I have some strong moral quandaries about the notion of the Provincial Nominee Program, but my questions are grounded in broader issues about the appropriateness of recruiting new citizens based on ability to pay, not in the immigrants involved in the program, the companies they invested in, or the way the program was administered. There’s no question that the program has improved the economy of the province, and has increased the diversity of the Island population, both of which are laudable, and I think we should welcome our new investing neighbours into the Island family without reserve.

In the end, regardless of my feelings about the Nominee Program, I continue to think that, as citizens, we have a responsibility to understand the corporations we allow to exist in our midst, who controls them, and what their motivations and goals are.