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January 6, 2006
manufacturing content.
PK pointed me to a two week old Om Malik discussion on plagiarism and spam blogging. He forwarded it b/c unmediated was mentioned in TechDirt's post on the subject. Damn -- I so missed the boat on reblogging that one. ;)
Although Mike puts out the fire on splogs...
" One major difference is that the site Om is specifically complaining about is taking his content without crediting him -- which is a more reasonable complaint, but not quite what everyone seems to be talking about. However, when that's happened to Techdirt we've discovered two things -- and both suggest that all this debate is a waste of time. the sites that (1) don't credit properly and (2) don't respond to such emails almost always disappear within a month. Why? Because no one reads them."
...there seemed to be a bit of discussion of the aggregator/resyndicaiton thing....
"Obviously, you can argue that scraper sites don't add value, but some people could find them useful as aggregations of content. Sites like Unmediated and Davenetics' Newsmonger (which appears to be down right now) don't do anything other than repost other people's content (including our own) -- and yet we don't hear too many people complaining about them "making money" off of bloggers' content."
Well, I get that Om isn't talking about reBlog as it's more of a curation tool than a straight up aggregator. And while the value of tools like reBlog lay closer to problems of cognitive overload than with lazy clickers, what a lot of folks don't realize is that unmediated (and many other reBlogs like it) doesn't make a penny on ads that appear on the site. While reblogged entries may be pared down for brevity (with a "Continued at [Source Blog]" link in the post), any ads that appear in the RSS feed remain in the post. (The occasional exception being those that use poorly structured tables that mess with my page formatting or reference external CSS.) So if someone clicks through that reblogged Joystiq sponsor link, it adds to Jason's impressions -- not Eyebeam's or unmediated's.
One thing that's always interested me about reblogging is the ability to see the explicit 'how' and 'why' of a meme's propagation. It's built into the reBlog software and default templates. At unmediated, we try to keep the attribute blog as the primary link. This way, you can always follow the breadcrumbs in a way that's not always apparent with a Technorati search.
The clever devil in all of this is that "originating" blogs themselves are almost oppressively dependent upon existing institutions for their information disperal and I mean that in a depressing Herman and Chomsky sort of way. It's why the "blogs vs mainstream media" debate always struck me as disingenuous and incidental.
It's also why, ultimately, this conversation will probably resurface again in a cycle or two.
Posted by yatta at January 6, 2006 2:02 AM