How do bloggers hold onto the value they've created?
Mathew Ingram, riffing on a Fred Wilson post, talks about the notion of bloggers getting “paid” via comments. In essence, comments are held up as part of the value to a blog/website and to the web publishers that run them.
Ingram notes that “It would be nice to think that the sheer joy of crafting an awesome blog post was enough, but some feedback is nice too.” The web of course and blogs in particular are ideally suited for feedback and interaction between publishers and readers. And the vast majority of bloggers are not entirely altruistic: they want comments, they want page views, and most would also love to get paid as part of the overall bargain.
A larger issue that has been widely debated over the last few months is what happens when an idea is introduced and conversation started on one website – the “home” or original source of its value in a sense – and then continued elsewhere. Somewhat complex questions are introduced: does the publisher deserve “credit” for introducing the idea / story / conversation (and how is it issued)? How do bloggers cope with “original” conversations taking place offsite? And how can bloggers/web publishers keep track of how people are responding and continue to add value to their own “brand”?
My personal take is that content aggregators and communications platforms – like Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, and Readburner – are actually useful marketing platforms for bloggers. In other words, participation on these platforms can help increase the value of one’s own website (in terms of comments and especially page views and repeat visitors that ultimately drive the bottom line of the online publishing economy). However, I draw a hard line on Shyftr, a site that pulls the entire full text RSS feed away from publishers and creates community around it. That deflates the marketing opportunity and value proposition between publishers and new audiences.
Even much discussed services like Disqus and the red hot FriendFeed have their problems. Ingram smartly notes in the comments section of his piece:
I have to say that’s one of my main peeves with FriendFeed, actually — every time someone shares something from Google Reader, or posts it to Twitter or shares it in some other way, it becomes a new instance of that item and comments aggregate in different places. I wish FF
could pull those items together.
Therefore, “distributed conversations” can run away from themselves, and ultimately dilute the value of the original publisher or “conversation instigator” as well as the total value of the conversation itself. FriendFeed – which has been heralded by some as the one aggregator to rule them all – has not solved and some way perpetuates this potential dilemma.
As FriendFeed continues to develop, it will likely pick off the best features of other RSS-based services like Readburner and RSSMeme. An example would be to display to users how many people have shared a Google Reader story within the FriendFeed ecosystem and display the total of the comments around that link.
So I believe that the bloggers and web publishers who embrace this Brave New World of distributed conversations can reap benefits for it. And I believe that new tools and features will emerge that will help to manage and track distributed conversations, increasing value for publishers and conversation participants alike. It just may take some time to get there!
