louisgray.com - Latest Comments in louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Matthew Hunt — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:02:37 -0000

You made some great points.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Matthew Hunt — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:58:56 -0000

this reminds me of the scraping issues that craigslist and other sites similar battled about for some time in the past. remember the issues around listpic and other mashups of craigslist, why some were banned and others allowed. why is google allowed to harvest and scrape info and post on their search engine and yet other people are not to do the same thing...? it's a tough call. i think we should all just keep playing nice and building off each others content and ideas, etc. I am really interested in seeing how all this will play out...

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Louis Gray — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:51:23 -0000

Owning the content and comments is a big issue for many authors, but
not every author. What you're seeing is a metamorphosis between the
old way of having siloed content and the new way of knowing the data
can flow anywhere. The tricky part is knowing where it's going and
determining whether to participate.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Jim Caruso — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:26:28 -0000

Great observation, since I've started using socialmedian and similar sites. Owning the content and comments is a big issue for any writer or publisher.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Noah David Simon — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:54:29 -0000

lol

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Stephanos Anton Ballmerfeld — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:25:31 -0000

NO!

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Ori — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:06:36 -0000

Hi there, very interesting post. We have decided at commentino (a new comment aggregator, I'm a co-founder there) to limit the "Article summary" feature to 200 chars + we dot allow comments on out site in order not to break the discussion on the original blog. I guess that the secret is in finding the right balance between valuable aggregation and keeping the author's rights.

my comments at http://www.commentino.com/orim

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Louis Gray — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:41:29 -0000

Eric, I'm glad you care (as does Duncan and as does Allen) and that you've been consistent on it. I thought it was worth revisiting after 6 or so months had gone by, and given the continued growth of sites like socialmedian and others. I don't know that we'll ever see a perfect standard, but it sure would help if more of these comment systems offered two-way flow.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Eric Berlin — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:34:14 -0000

Hey Louis, as you know I've been pretty consistent on this issue even though we disagree. My view is that a reasonable excerpt from the source publisher is fine on a social media platform, but that should be reserved to something more along the lines of 150-300 characters, and certainly not 1100. The key is to provide as much value to publishers as to the social media platform's user base, and to shortchange publishers by not affording an appropriate "tease" back to the source content breaks down that value proposition.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Marc Vermut — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:43:33 -0000

In a moment of timely synchronicity, Seth Godin blogged today on "The number one secret of the great blogs." (http://sethgodin.typepad.co... Wait. For. It.

"Every one of them leads a tribe."

Of course, that is a partial plug for his book, but the underlying point is that bloggers should be specific about who they are writing for/about/to and the leading voices in that conversation become virtual kitchen tables around which people gather (a la louisgray.com). I think that there will be both social curating sites that have general audiences but that niche/focused content sites will still manage to maintain audiences (why Techcrunch still has vibrant commenting, even though Arrington send out post links across the social media distribution network).

The last question that remains is how content creators will be rewarded for their work if it is diffusely spread and revenue doesn't always flow back to the source. Well, I don't think they will earn money on everything they write, but this isn't dissimilar to the issues that musicians face with recorded music. Bloggers should look at their entire ecosphere of earnings potential and figure out where they will be able to monetize their "value" not solely their "content."

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

socialmedian — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:33:05 -0000

Hey Matt. Thanks for the note. We have developed a fair use policy in consultation with our lawyers from the beginning. As noted, we did so in a way that was intended to thread the needle between publishers and general users of the site. Yeah, we probably pushed the limits a bit with 1100 characters but that was on purpose. We thought of publishing our fair use policy on the site from day 1 but decided instead to just maintain a policy internally at first and learn from it. I'm happy now that the policy is getting some attention externally so we can learn even more. Our attorneys advised us that the key is to have a policy that is consistent and which respects the rights of content creators. We feel good that we have done that.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Matt Shaulis — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:25:38 -0000

Murky area for bloggers, app developers, and users ... yes. But having heard from the horses mouths exactly what IP lawyers think about this very subject I can say with utmost confidence that their opinions are anything but murky. I think we can all admit (and going from the words of people like Tony Hung back in the spring) that 1100 characters is a bit much.

Something Shyftr did not do when we got pulled out on the carpet on this is claim that we were following a "fair use" policy of some kind. We were simply syndicating the data as it was provided in the feed. Our original intention was to be sure to not tamper with the content in any way. Knowing that many publishers chose to advertise in their feed, it felt wrong to us to truncate that content even a little for fear it would appear as though we were trying to usurp a publishers ad (something we would never ever want to do).

When we were presented with the other side of the coin it became clear to us that we needed to change our policies and we did so quickly and we moved on. I would be remiss to advise you on what an appropriate fair use policy would be for Social Median... I can only share my opinions and my scars and hope that you will find yourself capable of quickly addressing the concerns of the people who work so hard to give the blogosphere all of it's wonderful content. I've always kept the bloggers at the forefront of my concern because I love reading blogs and only ever wanted to make that a more communal experience for everyone... I could never express to the community enough how much it hurts to have so many bloggers hate me now because they think I was out to "steal" from them or otherwise undercut them somehow... was just never our intent. :-\

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Louis Gray — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:31:51 -0000

Dave's comments are right. Shyftr did a great job responding quickly to the issues this Spring. They were never ill-intended, and it's unfortunate they got labeled the way they did. I've also been disappointed with Favorit, as I had really high expectations for them and they seem to have completely underdelivered.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

socialmedian — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:31:46 -0000

It's a murky area. Still working on what the right mix is here. What do you think would be more appropriate "fair use" ?

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Louis Gray — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:30:43 -0000

Geoff, send me an e-mail on MessageDance if you can. Looking forward to learning more.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Louis Gray — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:30:07 -0000

Matt, from what I've seen, Jason is trustworthy and I don't think it would behoove him to not get guidance and say he did. As we trusted your intentions through the frustrations this Spring, I'd ask that you trust him here as well. What this post was intended to do was to open the discussion rather than point fingers. So... I guess I'm saying "stand down". :-)

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Matt Shaulis — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:21:55 -0000

1100 characters seems well outside what one would qualify as fair use. I'd be interested to know a world class IP attorney that would agree with you on this. Any "leading copywrite[sic] lawyers" would err on the side of caution... so I'm not exactly sure I believe you. (Either that, or your lawyers pulled one over on you as far as being "leading lawyers in the world".)

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Write_It_Right — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:16:13 -0000

So you have leading "copywrite" lawyers? Do they spellcheck for you as well?

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Dave Stanley — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:01:03 -0000

Unfortunately, we're down because we're migrating a bunch of data and re-writing our api. Once that's completed we'll be back up. This is what we're not doing. We're not showing full content on standalone pages anymore. In the reader, we show the feed as it is published (just as any other reader displays feed content). On standalone item pages we have a very abbreviated snippet of content (50 words). In the activity stream, we just provide the title of the story. And if you have a blog and want to pull the activity, comments included, back to your blog via an embeddable widget, you can do so. And the title of the post always links back to the source (in the reader, in the activity stream, on standalone pages).

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

socialmedian — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 06:46:43 -0000

Hi everyone. We created socialmedian's "fair use" policy about 6 months ago with 3 goals in mind:
1. Have a clear and consistent policy for all content on the site
2. Have that policy be publisher friendly
3. Have that policy be socialmedian user friendly.

We designed our policy with some of the leading copywrite lawyers in the world.

We know it is not perfect but it is a good start and we have tweaked it slightly as we have learned and gathered user and publisher feedback and we will continue to do so.

Thanks!

-jason

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

robdiana — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 06:34:00 -0000

I think part of the reason is due to sites like socialmedian and FriendFeed promoting the conversations. Most people don't complain when they see the amount of conversation they can get on SM or FF, as well as the little bit of traffic they both drive. However, I am obviously a bit of an evangelist for distributed conversations :)

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

geoff — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:14:11 -0000

Socialmedian should just a % of the original post not a defined number of chars. MessageDance does that type of logic when you create a blog entry via email to your blog and then 25%, 50% or 100% shows in MessageDance.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

AramZS — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:57:49 -0000

All my content is Creative Commons share alike. This is the way things are going, it is reality. There are two solutions. Bring the comments back in, as this blog does with FF. The other is to be active on the services which share your blog. People read and like articles and posts not because of what format they are in but because of what is in them and who wrote them.

Yes, sorry, you will have to work harder to engage your readers. Yes, sorry, site hits will be harder and harder to get. But you know what else? It also means that for the first time we are going to be seeing an internet where what someone wrote matters, not where they wrote it. If I have to put a little more effort out there to connect with the community, then so be it. (Not that I have much of a community at the moment :P ).

The end result is what is causing all this "blogs are dead" bull. The physical webpage format is no longer a viable one for small people who want to make a living off blogging. It sucks, I know. But blogging is still going strong, it's just that not all the activity is going on the blog. Time to find a new way to advertise and a new way to make money for those bloggers who are looking to make a living off it (just look at Gawker's serious consolidation). If you want to keep the traffic going to your site, it means a lot more work. However, for the little guys (those of us doing it for the love), this may be a change for the better.

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Edwin Khodabakchian — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:40:46 -0000

Hi Duncan: do you put ads in your RSS feeds? If not, is there a specific reason behind it?

Re: louisgray.com: Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

Duncan Riley — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:12:19 -0000

No, we still care very much. Social Median is trying to be fair, although 1100 characters may be a bit liberal on the extract side, but I credit them for not carte blanche reposting content and delivering traffic back to the source, unlike the bottom dwellers at Favorit. shyftr.com is down at the moment so I cant see what they're doing at the moment, but the rule hasn't changed in 6 months: if you're reposting content in full that isn't yours and building community around that content you are low life scum who has no place in Web 2.0 (and that's the polite version). 2 years ago we called these people sploggers, nothing has really changed except some pretty 2.0 sugar coating.

That we're not talking about it much is more representaitve of the fact that some of these services just haven't gone all that well. Nothing like a dose of bad karma to fix things :-)