Scobleizer: Era of blogger’s control is over
Tony Hung
· 1 year ago
@Robert -- actually, what I wrote was that if a service which is going to exist soley on and directly profit from the content of others, it should have the courtesy to ask the permission to repurpose and recopy that content.
Surely content owners deserve that courtesy at least -- particularly when they've thrown up a creative commons license? (as I have)
Definitely a big believer in openness and portability when it comes to online discussion. Those that are worried about fracturing blog comments are way to worried about blog monetization. They should take a look at what's going on in other spaces and realize that comment fracturing could pay off big time in the end with huge traffic returns from the likes of Friendfeed and Twitter. In fact, my plan this weekend is to start experimenting with Tumblr which allows no comments at all!
greywulf
· 1 year ago
I'm firmly with the "Steal my content" crowd. If you love something, set it free - and that goes for words, photos, images or whatever.
Intellectual Property is neither intellectual, nor property. It's a lie wrapped in a fallacy, and deserves to die a quick and painless death.
I don't mind if people take my content and re-use it. Sure, a credit is nice, but there's also a warm fuzzy feeling that comes from finding one of your images on the side of a bus or wherever. It's like one of your children returning home when that happens.
The only exception I make is that I don't want anything I write or create to be used for spam purposes. That's an industry I refuse to support in any way, shape or form.
Joseph "Giuseppe" Zuccaro
· 1 year ago
The truth is not that bloggers "had" control; the same thing that happened to traditional media (music, publishing in terms of pirating) is merely happening to bloggers too. This is because bloggers are seen as a source of ideas. And blogger should not bemoan this - in some sense it's a taste of their own medicine.
But look at it this way - ideas now have the most powerful channel of communication - the blogosphere - that the world has ever know. Ideas will flow through the blogosphere, and through the "Wisdom of Crowds," be argued and appended, and the most popular ideas (not necessarily the wisest) will survive. As ideas spread and reach the "Long Tail," they will permutate into other ideas that fit the needs of each subset in the Long Tail.
I would also submit that there is a continuum of blogging integrity (for lack of a better phrase), from "my ideas should not be stolen, and I won't steal yours," to "my ideas and yours are up for grabs." We all fall somewhere along the continuum. Many bloggers paraphrase things they've read elsewhere without giving credit. But in the end, like water, which constantly seeks to find its own level, ideas will ultimate trickle out of a container when a hole develops. And that hole was voluntarily posted to the blogosphere by the blogger.
Nicole Simon
· 1 year ago
Robert, this is also because you do have a lot of content which is not high in 'value' as some other content is. You rarely write about topics which are expensive in the sense of people can make money out of it, nor do you have a lot of content which really is 'effort' in the sense of information people cannot get somewhere else.
A lot of site live of the fact that people visit their site for one reason or another. Take sites like freelancefolder or alike. They live on stumbleupon links / social media links going back to *them* and not to other sites.
This is not saying that you do not work or have 'not valuable' content, au contrair. just in term of monetizing. I would suggest you have a look at our shared items. What if I take that, rebrand it and sell advertisement to your work without giving you any credit back and such? Sell it for money?
As much as it annoys me that the tools are splintering up, it is not so much the control I loose in regard of the comments etc, it is more the "control" I loose when for example I make a mistake, what to add something whatever - I cannot change the ones who are out there.
Plus the tools for aggregating the discussion are not coming back to me without effort. I would not mind so much if I had easy tools to SEE that discussion, to be able to work with them without spending my whole day working it.
Where I draw the line about republishing my content is simple: Unless I get something valuable out of it, I am not okay with it. Especially not when you do get a lot of value out of it. Period.
Tony Hung
· 1 year ago
@Greywulf -- sir, you cannot have it both ways.
Either you allow your content to roam wild and free, or you don't, and place restrictions, albeit how mild, on it because (I presume that) you care how the content you created is being disseminated, you care about the company it keeps, and perhaps, you care about whose pockets its gilding.
And that's really no different than what other people who care about their content want.
So if you don't want your stuff being republished on spam sites, then yes sir.
That "counts". :)
cheers t @ dji
Tony Hung
· 1 year ago
@JDavey -- wow. I am going to try really hard not to sound patronizing (I'm failing I know) when I say that monetization is only part of it.
I'm quite familiar with the "give it away and reap the later rewards" idea; on the other hand, I can tell you first hand that Twitter (and I have been Twitted by a few popular people) and Friendfeed *AND* Shyftr traffic (from people who I know who have been "shyfted") amount to a hill of beans compared to ...
... well, almost anything. Including a Scoble link. :)
Furthermore, since we're talking broadly, if the person taking your content *doesn't* provide a link back to your site or attribute the fact that you even wrote it, there will be *no* way your blog gets return traffic.
{note: shyftr actually does both, however}
Cheers t @ dji
whatsnext
· 1 year ago
Robert: This is a complex issue. My content is intellectual property. Beyond the fact that I love blogging, and would not be able to sustain the creation of a top ranked blog for the past six years if I didn't care deeply about it, there are business issues.
My content already is free. It's free on my blog. And in *MY* RSS feed. And anywhere else i give my permission, through a creative commons license, for it to be free.
For those of us who have our own businesses, scraper feeds keep our potential clients off our blogs, which serve as a way of demonstrating our expertise in our fields. Many of my clients have come to me through Google and Yahoo searches where my blog posts are often in the top 10 on a given subject because I post very consistently on emerging media topics over the past many years.
Scrapers screw up blog search rankings, and that affects our ad revenue. That's a significant sum in my case and for many other independent bloggers.
Many of us also run Google ads, for which we receive money based on views of the ads. The vast majority of the aggregators are taking that revenue too when they take our content.
Google, Yahoo, Feedburner, give us something in return for running our content: stats and traffic, and often, ad revenue. Aggregators who are scraping our content also run google ads in order to take advantage of our search optimized blog posts and headlines. They're not giving, they're taking. I call that stealing.
Sebastian
· 1 year ago
I believe that over time, most of these comments will come back in one way or the other. FriendFeed (for example) creates a situation where comments are outside of the blog, which is uncomfortable for the blogger, because they have more places to check comments for, but better for the user, who can now use an unified interface for all comments. So far, FriendFeed has turned out to be a much better place for comments, because I can subscribe to the people whose opinion I care about (which are friends and "the A-list").
Eventually, I'm certain we'll see most of these comments that are made outside of the blogs come back to the blog somehow. This will most likely happen through comments-widgets like Disqus, which will work with FriendFeed (or their API) to aggregate all the comments.
gregory
· 1 year ago
everything existing all at once everywhere is what tech is trending towards
just like the privacy thing, everyone can know anything about anyone
omniscience in form is the future
whymommy
· 1 year ago
I don't make a dime from my daily blogging. I choose not to. And while that's a discussion for another day, I don't want other people making money off it either -- but for a different reason. My content is personal content, words and pictures about my children, and my cancer, and how we're handling it. When I get blogscraped and my words appear on an ads-only (no original content) blog, that does make me angry. Absolutely angry. They have no right to it.
Friends, though? They're welcome to any or all of it; all they have to do is ask.
M1ke
· 1 year ago
I think you missed the point of Tony's article - he doesn't mind the conversation moving, but the way that sites are monetising content without the author's permission is obviously not a good trend. I know that even Google Reader technically does this, but its very prominent where the sites content has come from and they don't show ads. Whilst anyone can make a site that draws from RSS content its frowned upon by most - by putting the same thing in a "social" guise the same thing happens without the condemnation.
I myself wouldn't be bothered about conversations happening away from my blog, but I'd like to know where they are happening. With things like FriendFeed you and I could both share the same item from a feed on Reader, but the conversations would be different. If the author of the feed had you added but not me then suddenly they miss out on a conversation that they started. This isn't a problem that's new at all, just that the more social sites allow comments on shared items, the more fragmented it gets. Back in the day, I may blog about an article someone else wrote, but I could leave a trackback and any conversation found on my blog could be easily read by the original author.
aniche
· 1 year ago
my brain hurts.
Josh Carr Superstar
· 1 year ago
Weird to write a comment on a blog post about how blogging and commenting on them are both dying.
I know thats now what the post was really about but I was trying to force some irony.
The real purpose for this comment is that I think it is funny that the same thing that happened to the regular media people that they didn't take very well is now happening to the new media people and apparently they don't like it either.
what should we call this content anarchy? Media 3.0? Newer Media? New New Media?
Migratory Media?
Louis Gray
· 1 year ago
I tend to agree with Louis.
If my mother forwards one of my posts by e-mail, and they have a conversation about it, am I involved? What about verbal conversations? Should those be dictated and recorded for posterity? Technology changes things.
I first commented on FriendFeed rather than here.
Do I have an obligation to copy/paste it everywhere I find this conversation? That'd be like posting a comment about Apple stock on every AAPL discussion board across the Web. Redundant and silly. There are different communities!
Yakov
· 1 year ago
welcome to distributed web :)
Igor Poltavskiy
· 1 year ago
Louis? Or Tony? Scobleizer!
hugh macleod
· 1 year ago
Conversation happens wherever two people meet. That was true, pre-web. It's still true, post-web.
This kind of discussion reminds me of the late 1990's i.e. "I know! Let's create a website where people will come by in their tens of thousands and talk about how great our products are!"
It sounded foolish then; it sounds foolish now. So I vote more "Louis" than "Tony". Though I'm sure Tony is a great guy, as well. Rock on.
Andrew Baron
· 1 year ago
I think you are right, though now the trend will be to bring it all back together.
Larry Larrikin
· 1 year ago
Like musicians, bloggers are just going to have to deal with change. They need to get creative and come up with new business plans and new ways to monetize. How about selling t-shirts and touring with live spoken-word blog events? haha. suckers!
tdonaghe
· 1 year ago
I think if something is in digital form and has ever appeared on the internet, it's a silly question as to who owns it or "where" it should be.
The internet owns it and it's located across (in possibly many places) the internet.
Phil Wainewright
· 1 year ago
It's high time commenting got separated from blogs -- keeping them in a post-related silo is broken, and good riddance.
But Tony's point was different -- it's about ownership of the original post content. Shyfter has crossed a line and unless it offers some recompense -- such as a) giving blogs an opt-out right or b) paying blog owners a cut of earnings from traffic generated -- preferably both -- then it's not the solution.
In the end, this comes down to technology and innovation. Shyftr is one way of doing this but it's not innovative enough. Commenting is going to become more disconnected from blogs and be stronger for it, but no one has yet come up with the best way of achieving this.
Avatar
· 1 year ago
There is solution to the problem fortunately and i see that solution as the future of participation. lets see if that solution does materializes this year, or until next year.
Alex Hammer
· 1 year ago
Louis is probably my second favorite blogger (after Scoble). Mr. Gray is new (in terms of my discovery) but very perceptive and articulate and very informed (well ahead of the curve). Scoble is all of these things as well in my view.
I agree that the most forward thinking bloggers, and content producers in general, will want their content to be "stolen". Not necessarily stolen, but to reach the largest audience. Hoarding is isolationism. It doesn't work in economics, and it doesn't work in blogging. But one's content is one's currency, so such "pilfering" must have guidelines. Sharing with attribution is one thing. But if the attribution is missing, at a minimum, then the content creator does not benefit from the wide distribution (someone else does). This is clearly wrong.
In the future hopefully conversations will continue to evolve. There is no reason that we shouldn't have a device such that we can instantly see and communicate with (across mediums: visual, voice, text, even video) those whom we are "conversing". Content then becomes an enabler to comments which becomes an enabler to real interactions. Comments and comment streams are not real interactions (or at the most superficial level), but they could, in the future I hope, really lead to them.
I'm increasingly hearing the term, but I still don't know what a bitchmeme is. Anybody?
Rachel Luxemburg
· 1 year ago
The issue here is more money than commentary. Someone leaving a comment over at Friendfeed versus on a blog is not that big a deal. Someone scraping a blog's entire content and making a bunch of money off it is.
IMNSHO of course :)
zDagger
· 1 year ago
I have to take the stance that intellectual property and laws around it need to be upheld strongly. As Alex Hammer points out, "one’s content is one’s currency." In an era where information is the most valuable product you can produce, giving away your product (property) is completely foolish. Owners of distribution channels stand to be the only people who can earn real money if intellectual property has no monetary value. Providing a distribution channel to multiple information creators was one of the great promises of the Internet, but one that's being destroyed by the idea of free information. Why do you think Steve Jobs has become such a fan of DRM-free music on iTunes? If music is free, it only serves to improve the profits in owning the distribution channel. (I'm not defending the DRM methods of iTunes, merely using it as an example for my purposes). MasterCard and Visa make money by owning the distribution channels of currency. If your content is free, you're merely providing an opportunity for the owner of a distribution channel to make a lot of money while you make nothing for your most valuable product. And "scraping", as it's being called here, is just the next step in destroying the value of your product until you have no income.
Jerome Paradis
· 1 year ago
I think this trend might resuscitate the full vs partial feed discussion.
I understand that someone who blog for a living and has original content might be tempted to implement partial feeds. Discussions could still happen somewhere else, but to get the full article a visit to the ad-supported blog would be a must.
Or maybe we will see an increase of sponsored feeds?
I very much prefer the feeds I subscribe to having full content but I understand how it can become problematic for some.
Nav
· 1 year ago
A bit off-topic, but you could argue that the reason you're seeing 'better comments' on Friendfeed is because, since they come from the Web 2.0 circle je... umm community, they fit your definition of 'better'. The more centralised feed aggregation becomes in the early-adopter geek cirle, the more and more it will turn into the aforementioned circular love-fest. Yes, syndication in all forms - including giving away your content for free - is great. But the dissemination of that content into a more and more specific, elite group isn't going to help anyone but that same elite group.
Brian Clark
· 1 year ago
Scoble, you're such a narcissist. You're only influential in the tech blogosphere, and these dime-a-dozen feed aps are only relevant to the tech blogosphere. Do you think that the regular folks who the rest of us reach using blog software care about any of this?
Quit speaking for bloggers in general. You have no clue at all, and no one appointed you spokesperson for anything that actually matters.
extra cruem
· 1 year ago
Let me see here... It seems to me no one would have a thing if it hadn't of been picked up elsewhere. Who is a self-made blogger or writer? I can see the concerns over selling stuff written by someone else and making money off of it--wholesale copying is plagiarism last I checked--blog or not I am guessing--I am no lawyer, just a moron who blogs.
Good thoughts as far as I can tell and an interesting topic.
Tony Hung
· 1 year ago
@Hugh -- thanks. :)
... but my original post wasn't going off on where conversations are happening. They happen where they happen and this isn't the place where I'm going to crow about that specifically.
My beef was that a service was using my content -- all of it -- and was building a service around that. I almost feel obliged to describe an analogous situation where someone decided to create an online comics site with 100% pilfered comics, but that would be ham handed, inelegant and far too obvious. :)
I contend that if you're ok with "content" being free, you also have to be free with sploggers stealing your content, i.e the "real" content scrapers, and the wholesale "theft" (if you believe in such things) of your work and have it claimed by others.
Cheers tony.
Reda
· 1 year ago
Digital=very easy to copy/change/move/paste, so assuming control over digital content is, with no disrespect to anyone, quite naive. It should not be this way but it is, and if you are worried about your content prevention (do not post/share your content) is better than the cure (take legal actions).
Regarding the topic of this post, I think is all about narcissism and control. The more some corporations find ways to feed your narcissistic ego the more you let go (e.g. look at Flickr).
Del Harris
· 1 year ago
i'm going to try hard not to sound like a snob but really, who gives a flying F what's on techmeme? it's moderately useful to see what bloggers are yakking about but it's small potatoes. i'm talking about traffic. it's nada. of course, it's even less useful to me when i see artificial and blatant ploys by certain bloggers - arrington's a prime offender - who put up sensationalist headlines so we'll click, only to discover a couple of paragraphs of pabulum. personally, i prefer twitter to find out what is the hot button issue. you don't find as many fakers there ....at least, not yet.
LPH
· 1 year ago
A couple thoughts: - This debate post occurs several times a month - Blog gossip is a typical post passed on as news - Press releases are common points of discussions - Rumors about new product releases are common
From these thoughts I do not see intellectual property. Instead I see these types of posts as extending the water cooler mentality.
The analogy of the water cooler, though, does not extend far into the blogosphere; that is, if the thought started with someone else then politeness suggests a citation is appropriate. This is not true at the cooler - no one would say "according to" but they might say "I heard."
In the end the individual is left to decide the appropriateness of a citation.
Just my 2¢
rambn
· 1 year ago
jesus. I usually don't read the comments. maybe if they were 140 characters or less...
chrisbrogan
· 1 year ago
I'm not a fan of "scrape and make money off my stuff," but if the larger question is, "take my stuff all over the place and talk about it, instead of just on my blog," that's okay. Except that I won't always see you in my searches, and I won't always know that you've commented.
For instance, I haven't logged into FriendFeed in 7 days. That means, all the conversations there aren't being commented on by me.
But then, that's a matter of people choosing to have their conversations about stuff where they want.
Boy, I'm glad I can say I knew Louis when. : )
Gene'O
· 1 year ago
I'm with Louis. When I write stuff that I don't want stolen, I don't put it on my blog. I save it offline and try and improve it to the point I can sell it. To me the whole point of a blog is that folks can come and snag your ideas. Yeah, links are great, but reading your ideas discussed on another blog is even greater.
:)
Peter
· 1 year ago
Bamn! I _knew_ a good idea had to come out of this somehow. The Twitter-like 140-character comment character limit sounds like an idea we should _defi...
Louis Gray
· 1 year ago
To take another viewpoint... should I personally be annoyed that the discussion on this topic (which I, in theory, kicked off) is taking place on Scoble's blog? :-)
Conversations happen where people have community and shared interests. I can't ask people who follow Scoble to return to the site he's linking to and post there too. It's human nature to want to speak with peers in a comfortable place.
@Alex Hammer and @Chris Brogan, you're too kind.
Sol Young
· 1 year ago
Good riddance. As tools evolve, so do we. Anyone with a bit of know-how can integrate these comment engines in one's site and make a richer, more powerful, experience for their visitors.
Embrace. Do not fear. Evolve.
greywulf
· 1 year ago
@Tony Hung sure I can have it both ways. Just as with a conversation, I can choose who I talk but my words can still be free.
Even though what I produce is free to use, I can still choose who to "sell" it to. That's my right. I can can that my content it free to you, and you, and you, but not *you*, because you're a spammer and I don't like your methods.
So yes, I can have it both ways, and do.
mytasantiago
· 1 year ago
I agree with Sol Young. Everything's evolving, and so we gotta adapt to our surroundings. That includes the internet. When something's disappeared, we gotta make up by doing something else.
k1v1n
· 1 year ago
Robert, see my comment on Twitter...
Carolyn Foote
· 1 year ago
I agree with Rachel.
If content and comments are shared for conversational purposes, that's okay by me, but if someone is profiting from my writing (and I don't have ads on my own blog so I am not profiting), I'm not so okay with that.
I do believe what we share comes back to us very often in all sorts of ways, but I do consider that what I write falls more in the category of "mine"--maybe I need to put a CC license on the blog to indicate no derivatives ;)
I'm an educator, so just to think outside the commercial box for a minute--what happens with student blogs. Is it okay for them to get sucked into these sites? We want them to be able to be part of the global web and to have readers and to become skilled communicators, but on the other hand, is it all right for their writing to be commercialized, or used by for-profit sites?
And is it any different than if they are using Flickr to share their photos? Would they see it differently because they're used to sharing on Facebook, etc?
Just some questions I'm thinking about as I read through the comments.
David
· 1 year ago
@Kevin Gamble
LMAO - but accurate
Robert Accettura
· 1 year ago
The problem I have is that there's no ability to archive and retain.
Lets face it. 9/10 companies in this space, like most of Web 2.0 will disappear in the not too distant future. It's just part of tech. We saw it in 1.0 as well. The problem is when they disappear, so does their data.
I love the fact that I can quickly link to a blog post from 4 years ago and all the comments are still there, and intact. I'd hate to loose that.
Web 2.0 is unfortunately modeled around data entrapment. What sucks is when the VC's decide to pull out, lots of great data disappears forever. That sucks.
Ripley
· 1 year ago
We new media types love to tell the old media how much they aren't in control anymore. This is a dynamic medium. User generated content, mashups, ect. Why should we expect any less for our own content. But it's getting a little crazy out there. In some ways, Friend Feed is an aggregator of aggregation. Co Comment is the nearest I have seen thus far to keep track of all the different places comments can happen in.
Tomb
· 1 year ago
Wow, anyone heard of creative commons, copyright. If you have the drive to make money off your own copyrighted material, you should put some of it away to protect it. Thats what lawyers are for.
If anyone has ever encountered the digg effect you can obviously see the benefits of people promoting your material and commenting on it, without them even copying your material. These communities communicate within themselves (thats what makes them communities) and nothing you do will be able to stop that. It's the social aspect of web2.0.
Instead of maintaining a totalitarian grip of your material, think of how if shared it may be the basis for material tomorrow. Oh, I'm sorry you can't make a buck off that, is that the problem? That you can't get a cut of people making money off your money?
As far as I have ever seen it, greed stifles innovation, yet never the other way around.
Luke Gedeon
· 1 year ago
FriendFeed should automatically send trackbacks. Bloggers can chose whether/which to display. This is better for everyone. 1. Easier to comment within the tool you are in. 2. Better and more comments. 3. Bloggers can keep up with the conversation they started. 4. FriendFeed gets more attention. 5. Easy to set-up using existing tech.
Come to think of it we need this built into RSS readers and twitter.
Jose Fajardo
· 1 year ago
I'm all for content sharing and conversations everywhere! The web should be free and content should be free, that's my whole take on things.
I write alot of unique content and I create alot of code samples that I'm happy for people to take and use.
Prokofy Neva
· 1 year ago
I find this pretty reprehensible, Robert. It's easy for you to yammer on about following the conversation blah blah, but blogging is something you just do on top of what you get paid for, which is doing video interviews, finding out stuff about technology, etc. It's a kind of running note-taking, the icing on the cake. So the more you personally can exploit all this virally-spreading stuff, the more your brand is spread to sell your value at your paid job.
What's destructive for another works for you, so you're willing to bless it.
For someone who has advertising on their blog, however, or who looks to measure traffic to somehow establish themselves as an authority in their field or community, these aggregator sites are unjust. They don't just link and discuss, they draw traffic away from the original place where the discussion can be the most coherent, where there is already a regular community of commentators.
This is a lot like the Copybot problem of Second Life. Tekkies sneer at us that it's technically impossible to stop "if your client has to see it then it can be copied" (although of course it is stopped in places like World of Warcraft of There.com) and don't bestir themselves to worry about how people can go on making content if their product is snatched out of their hands like this. It's one thing if my work is being commented on a site that does not make money with ads, or is linked, but if it is reprinted in full without revenue-sharing with me, and sells that content to sell its ad, that's unethical.
Tony Curzon Price on opendemocracy.net summarized this problem very beautifully in talking about "the community of content" and how he used the CC license to encourage non-commercial use of content, but to get commercial users to pay.
The site yolto.com particularly earned my wrath because they sold ads for game cards and other products by grabbing the full text of my blog and everyone else's, then "digesting" them and placing them with what they felt was similar content, then putting a discussion around it -- which in fact they themselvse faked by going around goosing it on blogs and writing it in themselves.
Half the time when you see "discussions" on aggregator sites, can you be sure these are genuine people who came there to make a comment, or flaks from that social media company trying to drive traffic and create the appearance of activity?!
Basically, what you are saying, is that Big Important IT Guys and Social Media Mavens like yourself get to exploit the exploitability of everybody else for their own advantage, and I'm sorry, that rots.
Prokofy Neva
· 1 year ago
jdavey, I fail to see how anyone can monetarize Twitter, unless they manage to get a third-party site widget that has advertising or VC backing that will also pay writers. Um, can you point to such a successful model?!
gregory, that's not progress, because no one has the attention to pay in the attention economy to all that everythingness
Sol Young, go evolve yourself dude. Do you have some other way to pay your salary besides blogging? I personally blog for intellectual interest, not as a paid activity, but I sympathize with those trying to sell ads or trying to build up expertise reputations. I don't see why they should embrace a site like yolto.com that sells ads against their content, away from their site, never driving any content back to their site. Why would any reader go back to a site when they have the full article and the discussion in front of them?
Jay Deragon
· 1 year ago
Traditional media has attempted to controll and contain their messages through distribution channels they control.
The opposite philosophy is what makes the social web social. Please steal my thoughts and distribute them and if my thoughts and ideas add value then it will attract others and get distributed by the people and for the people.
Christopher Coulter
· 1 year ago
Steal my content? Not worth bothering, and the time and effort to steal still costs. So even free, isn't.
Now replace "content" with "gadgets" or "furniture" and we have a deal. ;)
Stephen Paul Weber
· 1 year ago
"I’ve found that by being open with my content"
Careful how you use words like "open" - after all, your blog is clearly licensed "All Rights Reserved" under the terms of the Berne Convention and the UCC ;)
charlieanzman
· 1 year ago
Despite the very obvious paranoia being exhibited by more than a few (on their blogs?!), sharing has way more benefits to all of them than not.
A couple of these posts already have Louis completely written off. That's just crazy. He's writing some of the best cutting edge commentary around?!
Understandable that the larger monetized sites are worried. They shouldn't ... and they're probably spending too much time watching the competition, which has proven over time to be a HUGE waste of time.
sitecharts
· 1 year ago
why are there not more approaches to allow creators/producers/bloggers/... to monetize their content even if it is popular outside their own walled garden?
deannelds
· 1 year ago
For F's sake, of couse LOUIS. STEAL thoughts? Control comments? Than DON'T publish on the web. Go get copyrighted. Jeez. www.laraslousylife.com.
deannelds
· 1 year ago
OK, actually I do agree that if people take your comment, then, of course it would be really NICE if they gave you credit. However, since the world is rarely if ever nice, um, well, can't expect that :( cheers
JC John Sese Cuneta (謝施洗)
· 1 year ago
Hmm... "steal my content". I share all my content under CC By-SA 3.0 (and once FDLv3 is out, will also release it under GFDLv3) ^_^
All Comments
Surely content owners deserve that courtesy at least -- particularly when they've thrown up a creative commons license? (as I have)
{And it was Frederic over at the LastPodcast
http://www.lastpodcast.net/2008/04/11/go-ahead-...
... who said "steal my content".}
Cheers
tony @ dji
Intellectual Property is neither intellectual, nor property. It's a lie wrapped in a fallacy, and deserves to die a quick and painless death.
I don't mind if people take my content and re-use it. Sure, a credit is nice, but there's also a warm fuzzy feeling that comes from finding one of your images on the side of a bus or wherever. It's like one of your children returning home when that happens.
The only exception I make is that I don't want anything I write or create to be used for spam purposes. That's an industry I refuse to support in any way, shape or form.
But look at it this way - ideas now have the most powerful channel of communication - the blogosphere - that the world has ever know. Ideas will flow through the blogosphere, and through the "Wisdom of Crowds," be argued and appended, and the most popular ideas (not necessarily the wisest) will survive. As ideas spread and reach the "Long Tail," they will permutate into other ideas that fit the needs of each subset in the Long Tail.
I would also submit that there is a continuum of blogging integrity (for lack of a better phrase), from "my ideas should not be stolen, and I won't steal yours," to "my ideas and yours are up for grabs." We all fall somewhere along the continuum. Many bloggers paraphrase things they've read elsewhere without giving credit. But in the end, like water, which constantly seeks to find its own level, ideas will ultimate trickle out of a container when a hole develops. And that hole was voluntarily posted to the blogosphere by the blogger.
A lot of site live of the fact that people visit their site for one reason or another. Take sites like freelancefolder or alike. They live on stumbleupon links / social media links going back to *them* and not to other sites.
This is not saying that you do not work or have 'not valuable' content, au contrair. just in term of monetizing. I would suggest you have a look at our shared items. What if I take that, rebrand it and sell advertisement to your work without giving you any credit back and such? Sell it for money?
As much as it annoys me that the tools are splintering up, it is not so much the control I loose in regard of the comments etc, it is more the "control" I loose when for example I make a mistake, what to add something whatever - I cannot change the ones who are out there.
Plus the tools for aggregating the discussion are not coming back to me without effort. I would not mind so much if I had easy tools to SEE that discussion, to be able to work with them without spending my whole day working it.
Where I draw the line about republishing my content is simple: Unless I get something valuable out of it, I am not okay with it. Especially not when you do get a lot of value out of it. Period.
Either you allow your content to roam wild and free, or you don't, and place restrictions, albeit how mild, on it because (I presume that) you care how the content you created is being disseminated, you care about the company it keeps, and perhaps, you care about whose pockets its gilding.
And that's really no different than what other people who care about their content want.
So if you don't want your stuff being republished on spam sites, then yes sir.
That "counts". :)
cheers
t @ dji
I'm quite familiar with the "give it away and reap the later rewards" idea; on the other hand, I can tell you first hand that Twitter (and I have been Twitted by a few popular people) and Friendfeed *AND* Shyftr traffic (from people who I know who have been "shyfted") amount to a hill of beans compared to ...
... well, almost anything. Including a Scoble link. :)
Furthermore, since we're talking broadly, if the person taking your content *doesn't* provide a link back to your site or attribute the fact that you even wrote it, there will be *no* way your blog gets return traffic.
{note: shyftr actually does both, however}
Cheers
t @ dji
My content already is free. It's free on my blog. And in *MY* RSS feed. And anywhere else i give my permission, through a creative commons license, for it to be free.
For those of us who have our own businesses, scraper feeds keep our potential clients off our blogs, which serve as a way of demonstrating our expertise in our fields. Many of my clients have come to me through Google and Yahoo searches where my blog posts are often in the top 10 on a given subject because I post very consistently on emerging media topics over the past many years.
Scrapers screw up blog search rankings, and that affects our ad revenue. That's a significant sum in my case and for many other independent bloggers.
Many of us also run Google ads, for which we receive money based on views of the ads. The vast majority of the aggregators are taking that revenue too when they take our content.
Google, Yahoo, Feedburner, give us something in return for running our content: stats and traffic, and often, ad revenue. Aggregators who are scraping our content also run google ads in order to take advantage of our search optimized blog posts and headlines. They're not giving, they're taking. I call that stealing.
FriendFeed (for example) creates a situation where comments are outside of the blog, which is uncomfortable for the blogger, because they have more places to check comments for, but better for the user, who can now use an unified interface for all comments.
So far, FriendFeed has turned out to be a much better place for comments, because I can subscribe to the people whose opinion I care about (which are friends and "the A-list").
Eventually, I'm certain we'll see most of these comments that are made outside of the blogs come back to the blog somehow. This will most likely happen through comments-widgets like Disqus, which will work with FriendFeed (or their API) to aggregate all the comments.
just like the privacy thing, everyone can know anything about anyone
omniscience in form is the future
Friends, though? They're welcome to any or all of it; all they have to do is ask.
I myself wouldn't be bothered about conversations happening away from my blog, but I'd like to know where they are happening. With things like FriendFeed you and I could both share the same item from a feed on Reader, but the conversations would be different. If the author of the feed had you added but not me then suddenly they miss out on a conversation that they started. This isn't a problem that's new at all, just that the more social sites allow comments on shared items, the more fragmented it gets. Back in the day, I may blog about an article someone else wrote, but I could leave a trackback and any conversation found on my blog could be easily read by the original author.
I know thats now what the post was really about but I was trying to force some irony.
The real purpose for this comment is that I think it is funny that the same thing that happened to the regular media people that they didn't take very well is now happening to the new media people and apparently they don't like it either.
what should we call this content anarchy?
Media 3.0?
Newer Media?
New New Media?
Migratory Media?
If my mother forwards one of my posts by e-mail, and they have a conversation about it, am I involved? What about verbal conversations? Should those be dictated and recorded for posterity? Technology changes things.
I first commented on FriendFeed rather than here.
Do I have an obligation to copy/paste it everywhere I find this conversation? That'd be like posting a comment about Apple stock on every AAPL discussion board across the Web. Redundant and silly. There are different communities!
This kind of discussion reminds me of the late 1990's i.e. "I know! Let's create a website where people will come by in their tens of thousands and talk about how great our products are!"
It sounded foolish then; it sounds foolish now. So I vote more "Louis" than "Tony". Though I'm sure Tony is a great guy, as well. Rock on.
The internet owns it and it's located across (in possibly many places) the internet.
But Tony's point was different -- it's about ownership of the original post content. Shyfter has crossed a line and unless it offers some recompense -- such as a) giving blogs an opt-out right or b) paying blog owners a cut of earnings from traffic generated -- preferably both -- then it's not the solution.
In the end, this comes down to technology and innovation. Shyftr is one way of doing this but it's not innovative enough. Commenting is going to become more disconnected from blogs and be stronger for it, but no one has yet come up with the best way of achieving this.
I agree that the most forward thinking bloggers, and content producers in general, will want their content to be "stolen". Not necessarily stolen, but to reach the largest audience. Hoarding is isolationism. It doesn't work in economics, and it doesn't work in blogging. But one's content is one's currency, so such "pilfering" must have guidelines. Sharing with attribution is one thing. But if the attribution is missing, at a minimum, then the content creator does not benefit from the wide distribution (someone else does). This is clearly wrong.
In the future hopefully conversations will continue to evolve. There is no reason that we shouldn't have a device such that we can instantly see and communicate with (across mediums: visual, voice, text, even video) those whom we are "conversing". Content then becomes an enabler to comments which becomes an enabler to real interactions. Comments and comment streams are not real interactions (or at the most superficial level), but they could, in the future I hope, really lead to them.
I'm increasingly hearing the term, but I still don't know what a bitchmeme is. Anybody?
IMNSHO of course :)
I understand that someone who blog for a living and has original content might be tempted to implement partial feeds. Discussions could still happen somewhere else, but to get the full article a visit to the ad-supported blog would be a must.
Or maybe we will see an increase of sponsored feeds?
I very much prefer the feeds I subscribe to having full content but I understand how it can become problematic for some.
Quit speaking for bloggers in general. You have no clue at all, and no one appointed you spokesperson for anything that actually matters.
Good thoughts as far as I can tell and an interesting topic.
... but my original post wasn't going off on where conversations are happening. They happen where they happen and this isn't the place where I'm going to crow about that specifically.
My beef was that a service was using my content -- all of it -- and was building a service around that. I almost feel obliged to describe an analogous situation where someone decided to create an online comics site with 100% pilfered comics, but that would be ham handed, inelegant and far too obvious. :)
I contend that if you're ok with "content" being free, you also have to be free with sploggers stealing your content, i.e the "real" content scrapers, and the wholesale "theft" (if you believe in such things) of your work and have it claimed by others.
Cheers
tony.
Regarding the topic of this post, I think is all about narcissism and control. The more some corporations find ways to feed your narcissistic ego the more you let go (e.g. look at Flickr).
- This debate post occurs several times a month
- Blog gossip is a typical post passed on as news
- Press releases are common points of discussions
- Rumors about new product releases are common
From these thoughts I do not see intellectual property. Instead I see these types of posts as extending the water cooler mentality.
The analogy of the water cooler, though, does not extend far into the blogosphere; that is, if the thought started with someone else then politeness suggests a citation is appropriate. This is not true at the cooler - no one would say "according to" but they might say "I heard."
In the end the individual is left to decide the appropriateness of a citation.
Just my 2¢
For instance, I haven't logged into FriendFeed in 7 days. That means, all the conversations there aren't being commented on by me.
But then, that's a matter of people choosing to have their conversations about stuff where they want.
Boy, I'm glad I can say I knew Louis when. : )
:)
Conversations happen where people have community and shared interests. I can't ask people who follow Scoble to return to the site he's linking to and post there too. It's human nature to want to speak with peers in a comfortable place.
@Alex Hammer and @Chris Brogan, you're too kind.
Embrace. Do not fear. Evolve.
Even though what I produce is free to use, I can still choose who to "sell" it to. That's my right. I can can that my content it free to you, and you, and you, but not *you*, because you're a spammer and I don't like your methods.
So yes, I can have it both ways, and do.
If content and comments are shared for conversational purposes, that's okay by me, but if someone is profiting from my writing (and I don't have ads on my own blog so I am not profiting), I'm not so okay with that.
I do believe what we share comes back to us very often in all sorts of ways, but I do consider that what I write falls more in the category of "mine"--maybe I need to put a CC license on the blog to indicate no derivatives ;)
I'm an educator, so just to think outside the commercial box for a minute--what happens with student blogs. Is it okay for them to get sucked into these sites? We want them to be able to be part of the global web and to have readers and to become skilled communicators, but on the other hand, is it all right for their writing to be commercialized, or used by for-profit sites?
And is it any different than if they are using Flickr to share their photos? Would they see it differently because they're used to sharing on Facebook, etc?
Just some questions I'm thinking about as I read through the comments.
LMAO - but accurate
Lets face it. 9/10 companies in this space, like most of Web 2.0 will disappear in the not too distant future. It's just part of tech. We saw it in 1.0 as well. The problem is when they disappear, so does their data.
I love the fact that I can quickly link to a blog post from 4 years ago and all the comments are still there, and intact. I'd hate to loose that.
Web 2.0 is unfortunately modeled around data entrapment. What sucks is when the VC's decide to pull out, lots of great data disappears forever. That sucks.
If anyone has ever encountered the digg effect you can obviously see the benefits of people promoting your material and commenting on it, without them even copying your material. These communities communicate within themselves (thats what makes them communities) and nothing you do will be able to stop that. It's the social aspect of web2.0.
Instead of maintaining a totalitarian grip of your material, think of how if shared it may be the basis for material tomorrow. Oh, I'm sorry you can't make a buck off that, is that the problem? That you can't get a cut of people making money off your money?
As far as I have ever seen it, greed stifles innovation, yet never the other way around.
1. Easier to comment within the tool you are in.
2. Better and more comments.
3. Bloggers can keep up with the conversation they started.
4. FriendFeed gets more attention.
5. Easy to set-up using existing tech.
Come to think of it we need this built into RSS readers and twitter.
I write alot of unique content and I create alot of code samples that I'm happy for people to take and use.
What's destructive for another works for you, so you're willing to bless it.
For someone who has advertising on their blog, however, or who looks to measure traffic to somehow establish themselves as an authority in their field or community, these aggregator sites are unjust. They don't just link and discuss, they draw traffic away from the original place where the discussion can be the most coherent, where there is already a regular community of commentators.
This is a lot like the Copybot problem of Second Life. Tekkies sneer at us that it's technically impossible to stop "if your client has to see it then it can be copied" (although of course it is stopped in places like World of Warcraft of There.com) and don't bestir themselves to worry about how people can go on making content if their product is snatched out of their hands like this. It's one thing if my work is being commented on a site that does not make money with ads, or is linked, but if it is reprinted in full without revenue-sharing with me, and sells that content to sell its ad, that's unethical.
Tony Curzon Price on opendemocracy.net summarized this problem very beautifully in talking about "the community of content" and how he used the CC license to encourage non-commercial use of content, but to get commercial users to pay.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/media_net/people_c...
The site yolto.com particularly earned my wrath because they sold ads for game cards and other products by grabbing the full text of my blog and everyone else's, then "digesting" them and placing them with what they felt was similar content, then putting a discussion around it -- which in fact they themselvse faked by going around goosing it on blogs and writing it in themselves.
Half the time when you see "discussions" on aggregator sites, can you be sure these are genuine people who came there to make a comment, or flaks from that social media company trying to drive traffic and create the appearance of activity?!
Basically, what you are saying, is that Big Important IT Guys and Social Media Mavens like yourself get to exploit the exploitability of everybody else for their own advantage, and I'm sorry, that rots.
gregory, that's not progress, because no one has the attention to pay in the attention economy to all that everythingness
Sol Young, go evolve yourself dude. Do you have some other way to pay your salary besides blogging? I personally blog for intellectual interest, not as a paid activity, but I sympathize with those trying to sell ads or trying to build up expertise reputations. I don't see why they should embrace a site like yolto.com that sells ads against their content, away from their site, never driving any content back to their site. Why would any reader go back to a site when they have the full article and the discussion in front of them?
The opposite philosophy is what makes the social web social. Please steal my thoughts and distribute them and if my thoughts and ideas add value then it will attract others and get distributed by the people and for the people.
Now replace "content" with "gadgets" or "furniture" and we have a deal. ;)
Careful how you use words like "open" - after all, your blog is clearly licensed "All Rights Reserved" under the terms of the Berne Convention and the UCC ;)
A couple of these posts already have Louis completely written off. That's just crazy. He's writing some of the best cutting edge commentary around?!
Understandable that the larger monetized sites are worried. They shouldn't ... and they're probably spending too much time watching the competition, which has proven over time to be a HUGE waste of time.
cheers