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Who Hasn’t Stolen The Conversation and Why The Money Is In the Conversation
This weekend’s bitchfest is about the "conversation" and where it takes place. We’ve got Louis Gray for the "Steal Me" team and Tony Hung for the "Don’t Steal Me" team. Then there’s Robert Scoble who should probably stick to running the camera for interviews. Canadian blogger Mark Evans wonders if pageviews still matter. That answer is easy: yes.
I went for a walk in Times Square and started to think about this question again. It seems to come up about once a month with some tool or app, this time it’s with Shyftr. We discussed it with Brijit. Last month I wrote, "There. Everywhere. But Here." Lastly in January 2007, we asked why Digg allows comments.
Here’s where we stand — everyone has already stolen the conversation. Here are some examples:
- Digg
- Delicious
- Sphinn
- Mixx
- Shyftr – they also steal the actual content
- Propeller
- News.YCombinator
- FriendFeed
Stolen conversations are where a service allows users to comment on content created elsewhere. On virtually none of the sites above, can you actually create content. You are sharing content that you think others in the particular community might enjoy. In my post about Digg allowing comments, I asked Digg to create a way for the comments to show on my post here along with on Digg. Otherwise what happens is that a post looks like crap because there is no conversation yet there might be hundreds of comments elsewhere. I continue to stand firm that none of these community sites need to allow comments – they should be pushing the commenting activity back to the original source. But without comments Digg would have 20% of the traffic they do today, the money is in the comments.
I’d like to see the conversation come back to the source because this allows everyone to join in one large conversation. If we can allow comments anywhere, and they can be aggregated back to the source, that would be a decent workaround. Make no mistake about it, in a perfect world, a reader would enter their comments on the source only so the source can benefit from the work created instead of from all the thieves. A user could read the comments from any of the services.
It’s interesting that not one of the other posts has discussed the monetary (cash or brand building) side of commenting. Both for the original source along with the conversation thieves.
One of the major points I was trying to drive home is that we, as bloggers, need to accept the fact that there are parallel conversations going on constantly. Rather than stick to the old metrics of page views, unique visitors, and total comments, we should instead engage and move to these new sites – FriendFeed, Shyftr, Plaxo, LinkRiver, AssetBar, RSSMeme, ReadBurner, Mergelab, Social|Media, BlogRize… you name it. They are becoming increasingly important in how I acquire, aggregate, share and participate with new data, peers and conversations.
If we do as you say above, and force the conversation to start at A, and migrate outward to B,C, and D, all you will do is push out a very small number of comments. We need to be open to B, C and D pointing back to A, and know that’s where we’re headed.
Hope you’re well, Allan.
Let’s assume for the moment that the genie is out of the bottle, and your dream of a world where the conversation takes place exclusively on the site of the original content creator is dead. Would even want a service like the one being described in the comments above, where all the comments on your content from around the Web get fed into your site’s comments? I’m not so sure.
In today’s reality, one of the things that sets the original content creators’ (OCC) sites apart is that the people leaving comments tend to be more respectful, more thoughtful, and more knowledgeable about the issues at hand than the universe of people leaving comments at the sites you describe. It’s part of what allows the OCC to deliver more signal than noise.
Of course you’re right about why virtually all aggregators are enabling comments: comments make a site stickier, and stickier sites make more money. Period.
As for Brijit, we think the fact that we’re creating our own professional, original content sets us above this particular fray.
Best,
Jeremy Brosowsky
founder, Brijit
obviously, as a social bookmarking site, we offer a place for our users to collect, share, and comment on their favorite sites. the commenting is new, so i am looking forward to see where it will go. i don’t think this is such a bad thing. i get what you mean though. i don’t see how it would be possible for most sites. at least with social bookmarking, anyway. someone might save a link for pepsi and others might comment, but where should these comments return to? that people are having conversations like they are is already quite a big step. things will evolve in time.
I think there is room for a service that grabs all that conversation and pulls it back to the source. Fairly easy to do I reacon.
there is a tech solution for this…vacuuming disparate conversations back to the source…query whether any aggregator will try objecting to such a service. Disqus is a natural for this…
I hadn’t been following this issue – very enlightening. Will watch how I post. Content should be credited. Bottom line.
and the twitter conversation brought me to the source.
Digg,reddit and the others drive traffic to your site,
who doesn’t want a story on the front page of Digg?
and surely that is the point, it doesn’t really matter
where the conversation takes place as long as it drives
readers to your content.
except for Shyftr which actually steal your content and
doesn’t give you any page views which is wrong.
as for the point about comments being returned to the post of origin I know that Disqus is working hard with FriendFeed to make this happen.
Allen,
I’m sure there’s a startup somewhere coming up with a platform/service that will aggregate comments from a variety of sources – just wait patiently for it!
Mark
thats not what i want – i want the conversation to take place on the source and then it can be exported outside — not the other way around.
That is never going to happen unless there is some sort of open format for comments. Plus how would digg know if the site posted has comments or evening have a place for comments.
lets face it these guys want the discussion and its a community thing. Its no different to how forums have worked for years. Someone posts a story in a forum and the forum users discuss it.