When does an excerpt tip over from flattery to content theft?
Relative newcomer on the social media scene socialmedian describes itself as “a social news network that connects people with personalized news and information.” Personalized social news seems like a worthy niche to go after, and I wish founder Jason Goldberg and crew well.
socialmedian popped up on my personalized radar today as I noticed a few click-throughs from it to a story I wrote about the rise of social media professionals.
Now, it’s always nice to see traffic coming through from a new source. So I clicked over and checked out the referring page. As of this writing, four people had voted or “clipped” the story, which is great.
The title of the story appears on socialmedian, along with the source site (in this case Online Media Cultist). Then we get to the “summary.” For this particular story, the summary consists of the first 176 words of the piece.
Is pulling that much content from a publisher’s site without permission content theft? No… but it’s getting awfully close. Readers of this site will note the problems I had with Shyftr, a site that flat out grabs entire full content feeds without permission.
There’s really no standard that I’m aware of for what’s acceptable for excerpting stories on social media platforms. However, it’s usually something along the lines of a sentence or two. Digg, the most popular social news site, caps descriptions at 350 characters. And it should be noted that the intent is that the story submitter is describing the story however they like as opposed to automatically pulling an excerpt.
Some people – Louis Gray for one – have no problem with this kind of content use. Gray notes that sites like socialmedian are moving conversations to “micro-communities where people are comfortable discussing your content with peers.”
That’s all well and good (and inevitable), but here’s a suggestion: cap excerpts at something like 350 characters or 60 words. That’s plenty to get a sense of the piece, then simply have a “more” link where people can link back to the source publication.
This is crucial as social media platforms must be partners with content publishers. It’s a win-win when source sites can be promoted within the umbrella of social media communities.
Recent Entries
- The interwebed planet
- I made the switch from Firefox to Chrome
- Building a better Fortress Twitter
- There’s tweeting, and then there’s tweeting
- Social web predictions, plans for 2009
- It’s a wonderful (subprime lending) life?
- Rounding out 2008 on OMC, and looking at what’s next for ‘09
- On social media advertising (and louisgray.com)
- Pandora vs. Sirius: what’s your online music listening style?
- Because it’s Friday: The Flatliners
