Should blog aggregators accept comments on syndicated posts?
This may seem a bit techno-obscure, but I’ve been wondering whether blog aggregators - sites such as Scottish Political News have a wholely positive effect on blogs from which they republish content.
I think that such sites should - very definitely - be “signposts” rather than destinations.
One question is whether such sites should encourage reader comments, or send readers back to the original blogs.
A Stone in the Pond
I’d like to drop a few questions into the pond of debate.
These are the question in the title, and a few others:
- Should an aggregator accept comments on posts that have been taken from somewhere else?
- And does that strengthen or weaken the syndicated blog?
- And is there any trade-off between the strength of an activist site and individual blogs?
- Does the existence of a strong aggregator (standalone or within another hub site) actually weaken the “network effect” of a community of blogs?
- Is this last tradeoff for the ease of creation of content by aggregating sympathetic blogs?
- Does it have any effect on other blogs whether the full article or just an excerpt is syndicated? (e.g., do many fewer people click-through if the whole article is reproduced by the aggregator?
This has arisen because I’m currently doing a tour of the main Party and Activist sites each day for my project to see if it is easy ramp up the Alexa rankings of these sites (answer: probably). I have been thinking about similarities and contrasts.
I’m interested in a conversation here about the contrasting impact of the hub sites, rather than “x is better than y” - perhaps we can all learn something.
A Tour of Sites
A few observations on party sites:
- Conservative Home generates all its own content and does not aggregate blogs at all.
- As far as I am aware (please correct me if wrong) a significant specifically Conservative/Right Blog Aggregator does not actually exist.
- LibDemVoice follows the Con Home model and does not aggregate blogs.
- Lib Dem Blogs is a pure aggregator that does not take comments, and displays summaries.
- Bloggers4Labour is a bit of a mixture, with both an aggregator and a blog.
- LabourHome - like the other two activist sites - generates all its own content.
There are a couple of non-party political aggregators around:
- The Witanagemot Club - an aggregator for an English Parliament - carries summaries from a range of blogs.
- Political Opinions is a pure aggregator with some interesting filtering.
- UK Poli Blogs is also a pure aggregator.
Comments Please
That’s interesting. Having written the article, none of the aggregators take comments themselves - and that is something that I am pleased to see. Individual blogs should be the destination.
If you have any thoughts, please leave them below.
Tags: blog aggregator, blagreggator, witanagemot club, conservative home, labour home, lib dem voice, liberal democrat, conservative, labour, voidstar, political opinions[tags]blog aggregator, blagreggator, witanagemot club, conservative home, labour home, lib dem voice, liberal democrat, conservative, labour, voidstar, political opinions[/tags]
The vast majority of blogs use the comment facilities that come with their blogging package: if more could be persuaded to use external services then there’d be the opportunity for B4L (and perhaps other savvy aggregators) to accept comments for a syndicated post and push them onto the same queue/list that the source blog uses, which would seem to be the ideal: maximum exposure for comments, and without duplication. In the meantime, I wouldn’t have a problem with B4L accepting comments itself on another blog’s behalf, mainly because I can be pretty certain the source blogger will read B4L sufficiently frequently that they wouldn’t miss them.
I’ve never heard anyone express concern that an aggregator was taking away traffic: I’d say the majority preferred that their blog was talked about, and linked-to, than that they had actual visits. What’s more, being a part of that blog ‘community’ gives them more exposure than they could have expected otherwise. Newbie bloggers at B4L would probably get 75% of their genuine visitors from B4L readers; I expect this will have fallen to 20% or so for the bigger and well-established ones.
Hope that makes sense - in a bit of a hurry.
When I was setting up politics-scotland.co.uk, a major concern was whether anyone would get upset. I stopped worrying about it when I realised how tricky it would be to contact them all, and took a “summaries only and direct link to the website” approach instead.
The idea for external comment facilities is an interesting one.
Another way to achieve the same effect would be to use social bookmarking tags (e.g., uk-election-2007) . I’ve done that with tags on posts, but the thought of doing it for comments is intriguing.
I’d fascinated to see some referral statistics. I have a devil of a job trying to track outgoing clicks routinely from here (especially to media files on other sites) - getting there but it is slow.
There used to be Right Links run by EU Serf but he seems to have gone AWOL for a while.
Thanks for the comment. He must have only just gone - I seem to recall it working recently.
But wasn’t that basically a link-exchnange?
Matt
Right links did aggregate
The idea for external comment facilities is an interesting one.
I guess if Google opened up comment feeds for the vast number of Blogger blogs, a service akin FeedBurner could wrap the vast majority of blog comment feeds up; they’d then only need to allow other (authenticated) people (e.g. those who run aggregators) to publish to them, and you’d have the kind of ideal system I mentioned earlier.
Nice little online business opportunity for someone there! Sadly I don’t have the time any more.
I’d fascinated to see some referral statistics. I have a devil of a job trying to track outgoing clicks routinely from here (especially to media files on other sites) - getting there but it is slow.
I do slightly regret not having a system that would log all clicks on B4L through to the original blogs, but without doing nasty things to the links/URLs, or making the system more flaky. Paul Burgin regularly reveals his weekly referrers , though in his case B4L continues to appear near the top, rather than moving down the list as his readership has expanded.
I guess the difficult thing to manage would be to keep conversations together across multiple blogs, and to keep those separate from comments on other conversations on those blogs.
One service that tries to do this is Cocomment (features.
My sense is that it would need a fairly close knit community to get going for this idea
Toque - thanks for the update.
B4L: I do slightly regret not having a system that would log all clicks on B4L through to the original blogs, but without doing nasty things to the links/URLs, or making the system more flaky. Paul Burgin regularly reveals his weekly referrers , though in his case B4L continues to appear near the top, rather than moving down the list as his readership has expanded.
I ran into that problem while trying to track the outclicks from my sidebar newsfeeds. May be doable but will require some research.
You may have noticed that I have put up a couple of pages of deeplinks to 18DS interviews and so on (after checking with Mike Rouse). I do now have a working clicktracking system, but I had to take a brute force approach.
The only way that I have found successfully redirects to mms: addresses is an HTML Refresh. I tried about 7 or 8 Perl and PHP packages and they all had problems with mms redirect, and I had to edit al the URLs. The alternative would be some Perl or PHP hacking - which is OK but I don’t have the time.
So I have created a redirect file for every potential 18DS programme - see the article here to check some urls.
Now I can track the redirects via my log files.
Have you seen this article on the question of linking/republishing by our excellent Chief Executive Tony Curzon Price,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/media_net/people_copyright/reinvention_scarcity
Thanks for the reference Antony.
I’ll comment on the article (briefly) on the blog - on Friday if I manage it before my weekend away.
I think OD’s use of a CC license is interesting - I’d argue that (as with aggregators) - the key point is acknowledgement and citation. Here my approach is one of asserting copyright, but allowing citation of content relatively freely. Further, I try to be as thorough as possible about citing sources and obtaining permission - e.g., to use cartoons.
One place where questions of “ownership by different communities” have come up has been in the case of the use of the Manchester Cathedral interior in an electronic game. I have written extensively about the legalities in that case.
Ryan Cullen | blog.artesea.co.uk
As the webmaster and creator of LibDemBlogs I’ll try and post some thoughts.
I believe an aggregator should only show snippits, this way people writing the posts know how good/popular they are by the number of impressions. Also some people write some rather long boring stuff!
Comments need to be in one place and that’s with the post, at the moment there is no easy way to show them on an aggregator due to the many different ways each blog system handles comments.
Having a LibDem aggregator allows new bloggers to appear to the world without having to do much work.
It also allows me to read a varied amount of views without having to click through blogrolls/bookmarks hoping that someone may have posted something.
And in reverse I don’t miss out on any good posts because I forget to visit the bookmark.
Ryan
>As the webmaster and creator of LibDemBlogs I’ll try and post some thoughts.
Thanks for the comment. I generally agree with you. My reactions
>I believe an aggregator should only show snippits, this way people writing the posts know how good/popular they are by the number of impressions. Also some people write some rather long boring stuff!
Fully agree.
>Comments need to be in one place and that’s with the post, at the moment there is no easy way to show them on an aggregator due to the many different ways each blog system handles comments.
I think that an aggregator that takes comments has overstepped the line, and is taking attention away from the blog itself.
>Having a LibDem aggregator allows new bloggers to appear to the world without having to do much work.
It also allows me to read a varied amount of views without having to click through blogrolls/bookmarks hoping that someone may have posted something.
And in reverse I don’t miss out on any good posts because I forget to visit the bookmark.
The 1st point - making it easier to publicise a blog - is a good one that I have not thought of. Thanks.
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