An argument against Shyftr and communities built around full-text RSS feeds
A few days ago, I noticed that a story I wrote musing about whether Twitter had become the new RSS reader had been linked to from a site called Shyftr. Clicking over to Shyftr, I noticed that the full text of my article was included on the site. My first reaction was that this was a “splog” site, or a site designed to “steal” the content of my site and then trick people who stumble across it via Google search into clicking its ads. (Yes, apparently there’s good money in this if you can pump out thousands of such sites before you get shut down.)
But Shyftr’s not a splog site; it’s something else. It does “pull” full text RSS feeds onto its site, but with the benevolent intention (I’ve come to understand) of creating a community around it. There were a bunch of lively and positive comments around my Twitter/RSS story, for instance.
Louis Gray is a fan and supporter of Shyftr, writing that it’s a “a next-generation RSS feed reader that enables comments within its service.” In Louis’ opinion, enabling community around full text RSS feeds is where “things are going” and what readers want. That may be true, but in all respect to Louis and the people behind Shyftr, it doesn’t necessarily make it right.
Louis is further involved in this story as I threw out a question on Twitter last night to the effect of “what’s up with this wacky Shyftr thing?” which initiated a rather fascinating and far reaching conversation that took place on Twitter, Friendfeed, and later across a number of blogs, including Tony Hung, Mathew Ingram, Mark Evans, and even Robert Scoble.
I think my original question which set up the argument and discussion still holds: Shyftr pulls full text from your RSS feed and creates community around it. Doing that without the publisher’s notification or participation doesn’t seem right to me, but I’m willing to listen to counter-arguments.
Communities built around pulling RSS feed are different than social news sites like Digg, different than meme trackers like Techmeme, different than social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and different than specialized search engines like Google News.
Taking full text from publishers without permission (or even any communication or acknowledgement) and building a platform and community around it hurts publishers in several ways, even if that was not the intent.
* Publishers lose control over their audience – Yes, I understand in our new distributed age this is going to happen in part. But think about it: when a story is posted to Digg, submitted to del.icio.us, and so on, the idea is always to have a link and description text “tease” people back to the original story. It’s all promotion for the original story and the source website in essence. What Shyftr does is wrong as it removes any need at all to go anywhere except for Shyftr
* Publishers have no opportunity to engage the audience – If a publisher doesn’t know people are commenting on his/her work, it’s a huge disservice to both the writer and to readers. Most bloggers write with the intent to answer questions from commenters, moderate follow-up discussions, and pull future ideas for stories out of the comments. The way that Shyftr is set up does not allow this to happen.
* The difference between Shyftr and full text blog RSS feeds – But wait, you plead. Publishers already “give away” their content via full text RSS feeds. Doesn’t that break your core argument? Not really, I’d answer (throwing in a solicitous sir a la Paul Giamatti playing John Adams) because an RSS feed still has elements of control. Publishers can advertise on their RSS feed for one, readers can click back to the original story to comment, and importantly publishers can track RSS feed subscribers and count those numbers against their overall “reach” in the blogosphere and on the Internet.
Tony Hung seems to agree, writing: “I think there is a moral and ethical obligation to obtain content from the content owners about reproducing feeds in their entirety.” And Mathew Ingram sums up the big picture well as he so often does: “I think RSS gives people the right to read your content — but not to build a business around it.”
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April 12th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
[...] Eric Berlin, who’s initial Tweets prompted this post chimes in and, amongst other cogent arguments, echoes Mat Ingram’s sentiments: building a business [...]
April 12th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
[...] no control over their content any more and should get used to it. Eric Berlin’s thoughts are here. And Frederic from The Last Podcast says he’s cool with that, and that pushing out an RSS [...]
April 13th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
“Publishers lose control over their audience … What Shyftr does is wrong as it removes any need at all to go anywhere except for Shyftr”
Unless of course Shyftr users wants to have conversations with non-Shyftr users. Maybe feedback for the author, for example? Or follow-up posts on their own blogs? Or discussions with the specific audiences provided by mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, etc?
“Publishers have no opportunity to engage the audience … Most bloggers write with the intent to …moderate follow-up discussions… The way that Shyftr is set up does not allow this to happen.”
How does Digg allow you to moderate follow-up discussions? How does Google Reader’s “Email This” function allow you to moderate follow-up discussion I have via e-mail? How does Twitter allow you to moderate follow-up discussion?
I find this particularly ironic given your “Social bookmark this page” which offers countless avenues to continue the discussion anywhere but here. But “it’s all promotion for the original story and the source website in essence”! Until they read the article here and take their thoughts elsewhere anyway…
“The difference between Shyftr and full text blog RSS feeds … Publishers can advertise on their RSS feed for one, readers can click back to the original story to comment, and importantly publishers can track RSS feed subscribers and count those numbers against their overall ‘reach’ in the blogosphere and on the Internet.”
The same argument could be made about any feed reader. Since Shyftr rendered content from RSS, any publisher-provided advertisements were probably still shown (didn’t check this before their recent update). The title of every Shyftr story was a link to the original. And if readership statistics are the problem, then Shyftr could implement something like Google did: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/02/one-subscriber-two-subscribers-three.html
So can someone please help me to understand why Shyftr deserves special consideration when its various “sins” have been committed by existing products/services independently for years? Is the blogosphere really so naive as to think the discussions they start have ever actually belonged to them? If so, why is there a trackback mechanism - shouldn’t comments on a post be in the post’s comments, not someone else’e blog? Why am I even posting here? After all, I heard about this from Scoble…
April 13th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
[...] them on the Shyftr site and letting people comment within Shyftr on those posts. There were a lot of really good posts from either side of the issue of whether what Shyftr was doing was right or wrong. I [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 2:02 am
[...] spark: Louis Gray (who else?) wrote about Eric Berlin’s concern over the comments that had accrued on Shyftr, not his own site. A legitimate beef, and one that [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 9:58 am
[...] One of those who disagreed was copyright attorney Evan D. Brown who, in his post on the topic, cited both a 1990 case that dealt with the kinds of issues an implied license was designed for and and an earlier post by blogger Eric Berlin. [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Keith, you bring up some interesting points but I circle back to the crucial differentiator for Shyftr: they pulled full text feeds and allowed commenting around that story without the involvement of the author. In effect Shyftr is acting like the publisher or an authorized republisher of original content. That makes it very different from simply displaying the title, link, and excerpt.
Now, I agree, services like Digg and even Friendfeed are still strange to me: aggregators becoming places of community, and it raises larger questions of where “the conversations belong” and “who owns the conversations” and all that. But in some ways those conversations pull away from the basic fact that publishers deserve to be able to hold some ownership over the intellectual property they publish to their own online outlet.
April 15th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
[...] Berlin, the Online Media Cultist, has some interesting things to say about Shyftr and its [...]
April 16th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
[...] including Eric Berlin, were very opposed to this while still others, including Louis Gray, saw this as a natural [...]
April 17th, 2008 at 7:31 am
[...] Blogs May Be Rendered Obsolete by New Technology (Chronicle of Higher Education) An argument against Shyftr and communities built around full-text RSS feeds (Online Media [...]
April 18th, 2008 at 10:26 am
[...] An argument against Shyftr and communities built around full-text RSS feeds [...]
May 19th, 2008 at 9:28 am
[...] But that self-interest should drive participation in these new social media platforms. As I’ve written in the past, that’s why I draw the line on services like Shyftr, which pull full text feeds from [...]
November 11th, 2008 at 6:11 am
news groups baseball…
Six Apart started a working group in February 2006 to improve the Trackback protocol with the goal to eventually have it approved as…
April 15th, 2009 at 6:58 am
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