Online Media Cultist

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.

Ah, there’s another “2.0″ to throw into the mix, everyone! Blogging 2.0 is now a part of our lexicon, thanks (I believe) to Duncan Riley, late of TechCrunch and now of a new operation called The Inquisitr.

Louis Gray breaks it down as follows:

Blogging 1.0 centered around who could:

* Amass the most page views
* Display the most ads
* Get the most comments
* Attract the most RSS subscribers

But then came along some inconvenient wrinkles to the mix:

* Full RSS feeds took page views away from the blog
* Readers installed ad filters, and didn’t click
* Comments started to live elsewhere
* Every blogger in an industry covered the exact same stories

Louis concludes that in order to be “successful” – a subjective term to be sure – bloggers must worry “less about where the conversation is taking place, but more about whether it’s taking place at all.”

I agree… to an extent.

I think that for most serious bloggers (another subjective term!), the game is to take part in the great Internet conversation, to add something unique and valuable to the mix, and to create a “destination presence” of some sort. The metrics for success around this may vary but essentially boil down to unique visits, page views, ad clicks, RSS readers, and comments. All the basics that are now being dubbed Blogging 1.0.

So even in a Blogging 2.0 world – a world where conversations started in one place are taking place in many others – I don’t see any change to this basic objective. Unless you’re the Mother Teresa of blogging, there’s always some self-serving interest to online publishing, whether it be the pride and satisfaction of adding value to the whole, or more earthly interests like accruing traffic numbers and the advertising revenue that can be driven from it.

Therefore, I believe that web publishers can think Blogging 1.0 while acting Blogging 2.0, so to speak. Engaging in services like Twitter, Friendfeed, and Readburner are great ways to join the new “distributed conversation” while promoting your destination home site, to get PR/advertising-ish for a moment. This in essence is very Blogging 1.0 as well: in order to get traffic you need to get out there, make friends, leave comments around the web, network, guest post, and other basic blogging promotion techniques.

So I think it’s important to remember that there’s some inherent self-interest for the vast majority of bloggers and web publishers. 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 publishers without permission and create conversations around it. That in my view goes past “what users want” and violates publishers’ core interests/self-interests.

Colin Walker says it perfectly: “Engaging in the conversation and being willing to takes those steps necessary will enhance the reputation of any blogger willing to put themselves out there which in turn lead to the secondary benefits we all go on about.”

Mark Evans worries about a potential chilling effect of Blogging 2.0 on professional full-time bloggers, musing that “if this landscape existed a few years ago, people such as such Om Malik, Richard MacManus, Darren Rowse (aka Problogger) or Andrew Sullivan would never have been able to become pro bloggers.”

I disagree – I think that today, even with a great deal of competition and new and complicating communications platforms, it’s as great a time as any to hop into the blogging game. Riley’s new venture is a perfect example: a strong writer with strong opinions (and connections and name recognition never hurt!) has an opportunity to find success in this new brave Blogging 1.0/2.0 landscape.

Finally, Duncan Riley says Blogging 2.0 is “all about the user.” My take is that by serving the user, bloggers can at the same time serve themselves.

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.

I expressed some pretty strong concerns about Shyftr over the weekend, a site that (until Sunday, at least!) creates community around full text RSS feeds.

There are pretty strong opinions on both sides of the debate. One of the best counter-arguments to my stance came from Scott Karp, who believes strongly in “information disintermediation” (a let your comments go free and they will return to you kind of philosophy), and serving the user’s needs over the content publisher’s. However, Scott couches this argument in the belief that disintermediation works – comments on a story appearing on the likes of Digg, Friendfeed, and Shyftr – only if you can read those very comments collected in one place, back on the original site where the story was published.

I’d be happy to buy into this but unfortunately we’re not quite there yet. Therefore, I’d counter- (counter-?) argue that what Shyftr does is a disservice to both the content publisher and to users, who are still forced to follow the conversation through a byzantine network of aggregators and aggregators of aggregators.

Now, while we’re digesting this lets remember that Shyftr did just change the way its platform works… in part. Shyftr announced the following on Sunday: “We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader. We deeply respect content publishers, and it is not our intention to cause unease.”

It took me some time to wrangle with what this change meant, and I’m still chewing my brain on it. But while I admire that Shyftr is trying to better respect the rights of publishers, I still feel that this is a little bit of a smoke-and-mirrors move.

In essence, it’s saying: you can still read the full text here (without having gotten permission from the publisher to republish the full text RSS feed on the Internet) and, what’s more, if you want to comment, follow us behind Door Number Two where you can comment away on a page where we don’t provide the full text of the story.

Beyond being an awkward user experience, I don’t see how this fundamentally changes my original arguments.

Louis Gray continues to defend Shyftr gamely, writing:

Unlike some have speculated, Shyftr is not on the dark side of the Web, a content scraper or a splogger (spam blogger). Instead, the service is trying to grow and find a niche where friends can share and comment on feeds, and over the last few months, I’ve grown to like the service and respect the individuals behind it, so I hope they can overcome this blip and work with the blogosphere.

I have to say that for where we are right now, Shyftr needs to stop publishing full text feeds. Doing that will place it back within a range where publisher rights are protected and user needs are being met.

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.”