Core Blogs, Aggregators and Blog Content Stealing

Mike at TechDirt (which I’m growing to like more and more on the time, and you’ll learn why below) addresses issues raised by Om Malik on his blog material being lifted and reprinted on other blogs. Bottom line says Mike, “fuggettaboutit.” As a person who writes for a living I have a strong feeling about copyright misuse, but blogs are to me anyway a new world. In fact, an entire post of mine was reprinted yesterday and I really didn’t care.

What Mike brought out for me was that blogs that reprint or consolidate blog enties (like SlashGeo) are a different animal than those that find/create/add value to content. He explains in response to the argument that those who do reprint are “taking money” from the original sites: “The people who would find such content interesting almost definitely are reading the original sources, and will know immediately that the site in question is ripping people off. ” I’d perhaps say it this way: those who are seriously into a topic read the top blogs in that industry. Those who have cursory interest read aggregated ones. (That’s likely true of in depth analytical writing and headline sites, too.) Only the “good” aggregators stay in business, because they add value as good filters (I got my start in Web writing at such a site, tenlinks.com). Core blogs (that “find/create/add value to content”) get most of their traffic/best comments/most referals from the hard core readers.

Let me use myself as an example. I’m a GIS weenie. I read lots of GIS blogs. I don’t spend much time reading the aggregators (SlashGeo/Planet Geospatial) because I’ve already culled out the best blogs for me and don’t need their help. I’m not a general technology weenie so I read but two tech blogs - Slashdot and TechDirt. I count on them to fish out the stuff I need to know and if they miss something, I’m ok with that. I have to believe there are those only vaguely interested in GIS who read the geo aggregators and might eventually get to APB that way.