Apr
11
Go ahead - ’steal’ my content
April 11, 2008 |
I’m not in control of my content and the discussion around it - and I’m just fine with it.
It seems Louis Gray has kicked off a bit of a discussion about feeds and business created around those feeds today. In many ways, this is really an extension of the ‘comment fragmentation discussion. A lot of bloggers are still worried about the fact that they are neither in control of the discussion around their content anymore, now even often privy to that discussion.
With services like FriendFeed, RSSMeme, Shyftr, Assetbar and others that create communities around RSS feeds, this has become more and more of a contentious issue.
Shyftr seems to especially rub people the wrong way - why, I do not know (Also see this discussion about it on FF). Shyftr is basically nothing more than an RSS reader with comments. A number of bloggers, like Tony Hung and Eric Berlin are taking offense with this because they did not give Shyftr explicit consent to use their feeds.
To be honest, this is a complete non-issue for me. I know that I am not control of my content or the discussion around it anymore once I publish an RSS feed - and especially a full RSS feed.
Here is what Tony (who I respect greatly, btw.) says about this:
I think there is a moral and ethical obligation to obtain content from the content owners about reproducing feeds in their entirety, particularly if its going to be used as part of public service which a) has or will generate profits from a service which is based on those feeds and therefore is a b) service which cannot exist without reproducing (i.e. “copying”) those feeds.
The way I see this is that by publishing my feed, I give you consent to use it in services like RSS readers, aggregators, memetrackers etc. Using the same reasoning we can accuse Gabe Rivera for building a business on top of our writing with Techmeme - it’s profitable and it couldn’t exist without using our feeds. Neither could Google Reader, RSSMeme, FriendFeed, LinkRiver or any other service based on feeds.
These services are explicitly not just simple content scrapers because they a) give me credit for my work (even if that doesn’t need to translate into ‘traffic’ coming to my site) and b) create value around the feeds through allowing commenting, aggregation with other feeds etc.
I think the real problems publishers have here is the fact that they are realizing that they are not in control - but I would say that they never were in control - the new breed of social media web apps just highlights this.
So to me, this is a total non-issue. But then, it’s Friday and we didn’t have a good bitchmeme last weekend…
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I agree — let the meme-ing begin!
The crux of the issue is around what each one of us allows with respect to reproduction of our content.
I acknowledge that I am not in control of the conversation and that is fine; however, what I think each one of us deserves is control of what what we say.
Its fine if someone takes all of your content and republishes it; its not fine with me.
As I said in my post — until there is a gross consensus on the matter, there shouldn’t be the presumption that it *is* ok.
And also — I agree. They are not a *simple* content scraping service.
cheers
tony.
I still worry about the conversation fragmentation aspect. We need something that pulls in all the conversations/comments whether on FF, Twitter, Facebook, shyftr, or anywhere and lets us reference them on our blog. The FF WP plugin was a nice start.
And it’s not because I want to control the conversation, it’s just because there are now so many places it could be occurring, I’m bound to miss some of it.
Ah — one more thing.
The difference between Techmeme, Friendfeed, and RSSMeme vs. Tolou and Shyftr is that the latter group lifts your *entire* post.
The former only lifts a portion, which, I think is “fair” (use) any way you want to define it.
I guess it had to be one service or another that got the discussion under way. But even Plaxo Pulse offers full RSS feeds with comments that aren’t going back to the blog.
Original: Who Owns This Conversation?
http://therealmccrea.wordpress.com/2008/04/12/who-owns-this-conversation/
Plaxo Pulse: Who Owns This Conversation?
http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/events/show/43867506
So… Shyftr is being unfairly thrown under the bus, big time. This is called innovation, period. A year from now, this won’t raise an eye.
@Tony - fair enough - I agree that there is a difference between those services, but for me, as a ‘publisher’ I don’t really mind, as long as I get attribution.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be easy to just add a tag to an RSS feed saying whether it’s ok or not to republish (fully or partly), use the feed in aggregators etc. Wouldn’t be hard to add, I think.
@Sarah - I guess I have just given up on trying to keep track of the discussions. I see the discussions on the blog, in FriendFeed and Yokway. If I miss something, I’m ok with that.
@Louis — sure its not new. In fact its as old as the whole issue of RSS feeds.
But I suppose like the issue of “A-lists: do they exist” and “Can you have a blog without comments”, there are some memes that never die.
And I think if you’re looking for differences, Plaxo’s business plan doesn’t rely on one aspect of it (Pulse) pulling full feeds. Furthermore, its a relatively private service (splitting hairs, I know) that is behind a login.
But the fact that its monetizing someone else’s content? Yeah, I have an issue with that as well, if you want me to be consistent.
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@frederic. I think that you are right: a simple attribute on the RSS feed would help clarify this discussion.
In the meantime, I think that people have been implicitly inferring that: partial feed attribute=only use partial content and full feed it is ok to display the entire content with attribution and reference to the source. But if some people are offended by this, we should go the extra step and clarify it further in the feed.
@tony: given that it is the end user which is importing your feed in shyftr, it would be operationally impossible for shyftr to contact every RSS feed owner and get an explicit approval to display the content included in the RSS feed. Operationally, it is much easier for people who would like their content not displayed to publish a partial feed.
If we do not go through this discussion and find a model where both people like you and people like Frederic, Louis, Scoble (who do not care about having their content being syndicated because what they care most is to have a share of the user attention), it is the end user which is going to pay the price because services will be forced the same constraint (show only partial content, which is what shyftr ended up rolling back to) and a large number of users really hate that.
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