Online Media Cultist

I’ve written a few stories about Shyftr over the last week. In short, Shyftr pulls full text RSS feeds published by websites and creates community around them on its own website. Although they’ve changed how the site works (in part due to an innocent question I asked on Twitter over the weekend, which set off quite a little debate throughout the blogospheric realm) the fundamental problem remains: you can read full text stories on Shyftr and comment on those stories on Shyftr without ever visiting the original publishing source. Some people disagree with this position, but in my view that fundamentally interferes with a publisher’s ability to interact with readers and the ability to create community around the original publishing source.

Last night, I discovered ReadBurner, a site which I believe does things in exactly the right way. ReadBurner takes stories that are being shared on Google Reader and provides a space for comments and voting to be made on them. The critical difference here is that they show an excerpt only and not the full text of the article. This in my view means that ReadBurner provides a valuable and unique service in the marketplace – content aggregation and social networking features focused on RSS-based social bookmarking – while promoting publisher source content. As LifeHacker notes, it’s a sort of neat conglomeration of del.icio.us and Digg.

I contacted Drew Olanoff, co-owner of ReadBurner, and asked him if he would like to comment on what his site is doing in comparison to Shyftr. I found his response to be very interesting:

While we won’t really speak to what Shyftr is trying to do, as we’re focusing on our own strategy… I can say that ReadBurner’s goal is to not steal the conversation, but to get it started. We want to be able to send new visitors to blogs who might not have ever visited in the first place. On ReadBurner, they’ll see a steady stream of fresh stories shared from their peers and will be able to interact and re-share if they wish.

I think getting the conversation started as opposed to stealing it gets down the heart of the issue precisely.

ReadBurner also distinguishes itself in a few other ways. Its design and user interface is clean, intuitive, and blessedly straight-forward. (It’s always essential for me to have the why am I here? question answered within a few seconds of arriving at any webpage.)

And here’s another thing: ReadBurner provides two prominent links back to the original content source for each article entry: the article title itself as well a “read more” link below the excerpt. The “shares” link and comments link take you to a ReadBurner drilldown page where you can comment on the story. Again, I think this is the right approach to take. This compares very favorably to what Shyftr does, where you’re almost always forced to be at least one click away from finding a page where you can click back to the original content source.

ReadBurner was founded by Alexander Marktl and was acquired by Olanoff and Adam Ostrow last month. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one for sure.