The Wardman Wire

This article follows my announcement earlier of a new news aggregator for Scottish Political blogs.

This set of principles is based on the “Six Points of Distinction” hughlighted on the Stop Bitacle blog to identify differences between “Bitacle and the legitimate search engines”.

For those who are not aware, Bitacle is a Spanish startup company that extracted content from blog news feeds and displayed adverts around the content without providing attribution or linking back to the original site.

These are the principles adapted for blog aggregators.

In my opnion 1-4 are cardinal principles which are non-negotiable. 5 (advertising), 6 (full content) and 7 (do not overwhelm blogs with file requests) are a judgement call, based on the context.

1. Link to the Source of the Post

This principle is absolutely basic. The content belongs to the original blogger. No ifs, no buts.

2. Provide an Opt Out

Make it possible – and not too difficult – for bloggers to choose not to be included in your service.

This may be done by asking them before inclusion in your site, or it could be done by providing an opt-out mechanism.

3. Be a Signpost, not a Destination

An aggregator should be exactly that – a way to skim content from a number of blogs in one place, and it should point to the original blog if the reader wishes to find out more.

It should add value, and result in more exposure, and ideally more traffic, for the original blogger – not less.

4. Do it right: don’t be forced to do it right

In the case of Bitacle, any changes that did occur only happened after a huge campaign.

Decent aggregators will do the right things without needing to be pressurised.

5. Do not overdo the Advertising

Some UK Political blog aggregators dispay ads – such as Lib Dem Blogs. Others, such as Political Opinions, do not. Both seem to work.

This is a judgement call.

6. Do not Display Full Content on your index pages

If full content is displayed on the aggregator website, then visitors will not click through to the original blogger.

It could however be argued that full content could be displayed on article pages – as this will give readers the ability to search the entire posting.

7. Don’t overwhelm blogs you are aggregating with file requests

Ideally the interval between each download of a blogs feed would be tailored to the update frequency of the particular blog.

In practice this may not be practical, so I would suggest that once an hour would be reasonable.