April 15, 2008
Blogs May Be Rendered Obsolete by New Technology
Academics interested in blogging for research-review purposes might want to take notice to some new developments—and debates—happening on the Web.
RSS feed aggregators are quickly becoming more sophisticated. New sites are cropping up, such as the recently-opened beta of Shyfter, which allow users to not only share their feeds, but also discuss specific posts in one place.
Some bloggers have taken issue with those developments. They say that Shyfter benefits from the use of their content and draws away discussion from their own blogs to another site. It makes it harder to track comments to their posts and keep discussion going.
The concept, however, doesn’t appear to be much different than what happens everyday on news sites such as Slashdot, which has a robust community of contributors.
It seems the heart of the matter is who gets to moderate or control the discussion.
Martin J. Weller, of the British-based Open University, has a forward-looking post on the evolving nature of blogging. He points out that blogs are having more competition with sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed for establishing discussion online because of their immediacy.
If discussion moves away from blogs themselves, one wonders if bloggers would still have incentive to publish.—Hurley Goodall
Posted on Tuesday April 15, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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There’s a crucial difference between what Slashdot, Digg, delicious, and other social media platforms do and what Shyftr does, and that’s pulling the full text RSS feed from authors without permission and building community around that. Removing the need to head back to the source to read the original source deprives content publishers of a fundamental right, and breaks down the ability for authors and readers to interact at the original source.
— Eric Berlin Apr 16, 09:58 AM #
No blogger is compelled to produce a full-text RSS. If you do (and I do for my blog), then you are inviting readers to read your posts without visiting your site. In addition there has never been any requirement that discussion of one’s blog happens on one’s blog. Heck, I just found out the Chronicle quoted my blog last week, and I still haven’t found out what they said since I don’t have a subscription.
I don’t doubt something might be lost here in this trend, but something else might be gained as well.
— Alex Reid Apr 16, 12:25 PM #
In my opinion, if it gets my posts read more often and gets my name out there then I have no problem with it at all. I’m sure they do/will have their own stats and records that you can link to. Why not let another site do some of the buzz generation for you?
Plus, I’m sure some kind of feed security option will crop up sooner or later.
— Josh C Apr 16, 01:46 PM #
Alex, I agree that a full text RSS feed invites “readers to read your posts without visiting your site.” However, that feed does provide in a sense a different forum for a publisher’s community. Publishers can track how many people subscribe to their feed, advertise on it if they wish, and count RSS subscribers as part of its larger community.
In my view, publishing a full text feed is not an invitation to allow other publishing platforms (aggregators or no) to take that feed and essentially create a separate community around it.
— Eric Berlin Apr 16, 11:52 PM #
I think these types of web services are an interesting step forward in user collocation, but I feel the other comments have hit the nail on the head. As a blogger, I take much time and effort when crafting posts but just as much time designing the main blog interface. I don’t mind being linked to or found through associations with other professionals, but if a site were to scrape and repost my information without citation; I might be offended.
— John Fudrow Apr 17, 09:23 AM #
My concern is privacy issues, since this is likely to give people greater exposure. I try to keep my identity private, even in my blog. I know others are concerned about privacy as well, so when I make comments about the happenings in my life, I try to respect the privacy of my friends who I might mention by not referring to them by name. Will we eventually come to a point that this does not matter anymore? But then again, I suppose once we put a blog entry out there, it is free for everyone to read—unless we use the blocking features that allow only friends and family on our blogs. With identity theft such a problem, we will need to keep these concerns in mind.
— Just Me Apr 17, 10:41 AM #
Eric, how do you track how many people subscribe to an RSS feed? I know that you can if it’s done via bloglines/ technorati or whatever, but I thought that if someone was just using their browser (and now all the main ones can), then you’d never know.
Mind you, I thought you were going to discuss twitter & that blogging is just old hat now!
— Emma Apr 19, 10:10 AM #
A well-known political pundit continues to use my phrases and words verabtim. He’s done it now about five times. According to to my feedburner stats I have low reach numbers. This is a very frustrating way to achieve syndication. I would like to get some credit especially if what I say ends up MSNBC.
— Andrea Hall Apr 21, 12:33 PM #