Derek Powazek has yanked out full blog entries from his syndication feeds and is now providing simple summaries. He apparently hit his saturation point with people scum republishing his content, presumably to put ads all around it and profiteer from his work. On the one hand, I cringe at the rational for his doing this. On the other, I know from personal experience the problem that Derek is reacting to is incredibly real and he may be executing the only workable solution.
There are so many thoughts tangled up into a ball on this subject that it's really hard to know which thread to try to pull out first. You can have a discussion about making it easy for your audience to read your content. Then there's that whole line of thought that treating your audience like criminals is counter productive. And, besides all that, there's the whole fact that digital technology means that anything you place on the Internet is inherently copyable, both for good purposes and bad ones. And before going into any of those discussion paths, there has to be the acknowledgement of the wish that we all have that people are good and we should be building utopia out here on the Internet and we shouldn't let a few bad actors spoil the fun for the rest of us.
But then, well, all you have to do is slog out there into the muck and decide what you think about the reality of the situation. Google and other search engines have created a vast feeding frenzy of people trying to milk search results for advertising hits. Every get rich quick schemer and SEO specialist has jumped on board the Ponzi express and turned vast tracts of Internet real estate into a shadow land of lure and temptation to get people to click on an ad and it works because it's so damn cheap—essentially free—to stamp out duplicates of valid content and you only need a thin marginal click through rate to make it profitable enough to do.
So, what's a content creator to do? Does one make things easier for their readers and thereby serve as an uncomfortable participant? Are you better off ignoring the issue and pretending it doesn't happen. Or does one clamp down a bit and go back to treating syndication feeds as a notification mechanism that there's new content on your site. In the world we had a few years ago before this became all quite so prevalent, it was easier to make the call. At least then the discussion points usually revolved around whether you wanted to get people to come and enjoy your site's look and feel.
There's something else at play here. The nature of blogging and individual content creation on the web is changing somewhat lately. I'm not really able to put my finger onto any one thing, but microblogging, Twittering, and the like are part of it. Facebook and other social networks are another. And the fact that there are now too many interesting feeds to read in NetNewsWire anyway is another. Besides, one of the big reasons I used to like full feeds in my news reader is that I would read them offline. I no longer do that so much. Furthermore, thanks to EVDO and my iPhone (and soon iPhone 3G with faster network speeds!), the number of places where I'm offline at all if I'm reading content is limited now to the airplane and lately, when I'm stuck in seat 6F, I'd rather sleep instead.
Part of me thinks that I want to gripe about Derek shutting down his feed to provide summaries only. I should be mad and tell him that he should ignore the bad actors out there and just deal with it. Part of me thinks he's right to be offended by those bad actors and is doing the right thing and that I should follow suit. And part of me thinks that this ambivalence is probably the result of using Twitter and finally moving past the "I must read everything that somebody posts" line of thought to really just browsing and jumping on the good stuff. In that kind of world view, short summaries in feeds actually makes a lot of sense.
I think that anyone who will take the time to create a summary version of a lengthier posting deserves to be applauded.
The given: unauthorized publication.
The assumption: people publishing the content with their ads are making money.
Splitting hairs? Yes. But if you get past the given and ask how much money people are actually making...and I would be willing to bet a Lifesaver™ or two that they aren't making jack, maybe the anger subsides just a little? Much like spam, the cost is so low that even if you don't make hardly anything, you can get going.
I hate to equate it with the tactics of other copyright conglomerates like the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA...but the fact the every unauthorized use is calculated as a full monetary loss may be wrong.
Of course, that doesn't make the problem go away. Maybe it's just a different perspective to take though. People were using your work before the internets came along, now you know about it. Again, not a rationalization, just an observation.
Thanks, James. I wish more people could be as levelheaded about this as you.
I've long tolerated the spammers and other individuals who call plagiarism "reblogging". What I can't stand now is the number of tools popping up that automate this process. It's as if, as soon as something pops up in a feed, anyone can take it and do whatever they like with it.
What pushed me over the edge was a site that was automating the duplication of posts with no attribution, using the full text. When I protested to the owner of the site, I was wold, again, that if it's in RSS it's meant to be distributed.
This, by the way, is exactly the same as people ripping off your photos, James, and reposting them elsewhere with no attribution. How many times have you been told, "If it's on the web, it must be free?"
I understand copyright and I understand the way the web works. It's totally possible to enable the web to do what it does, while still respecting the creators of the works. Unfortunately, most people don't bother. And I'm tired of trying to explain it. So this is my little pebble in the pond: If you want to read what I write, it's not to much to ask that you just visit my damn site.
Excerpt posts certainly skirt some of the automated scraping tools... but as a user/consumer, they annoy me. In general, I don't subscribe to feeds which only provide summaries, because when I go to my feed reader, I want to read the articles, not just use it as a launching point to visit websites.
It's all farting in the wind. It doesn't harm the web spammers (they'll find other content) and it just pisses off your readers who go to the trouble to read your blog. Publish full posts or why frigging bother? On Derek's blog I didn't even see a place to post a comment. Such drama over nothing.
ben K: Creating good summaries is a good skill for people to add. I've been making summaries of my posts now for a while on this blog for use on the index pages and have been quite happy with them.
Patrick: It's hard to know how much people are making, but in aggregate, it surely must add up. Otherwise, we wouldn't see all the effort being put into it. But, as Derek says in his comment, it's not about the use, so much as the pissant attitude of those that do so. Sure, the rules have changed on the Internet, but right now as we see how things are working out, shouldn't people discuss how it's going and how to react?
Derek: It is indeed that attitude that is a real pisser. On the one hand, I want to be a generous actor. On the other hand, I've run into the ick side so much that I understand exactly where you are coming from. We're really in an interesting place as we're all evidently comfortable enough with "FREE", but always wrestling with the question of "What degree of FREE?" It's something that I wrestle with every day.
Aaron: Indeed, user annoyance is part of the equation. Everyone is free to make your choices about what to read. Like I said, I'm not sure what to make of where we are currently, except that I understand both points of view fairly well and it's currently feeling like every option is suboptimal for a large group of people. We need to find ourselves to a world where a win for the readers is an unqualified win for the content creators and vice versa.
Yes, Chris, I turned off comments for this post on my site, because I knew my post would solicit comments just like yours. If it's "drama over nothing," why bother wasting your time saying so?
FWIW, I updated my post. I'm giving a couple WordPress plugins a try, along with full-text feeds. We'll see how this experiment turns out.
It's a double-edged sword, y'all.
On the one hand, you will cut down on the amount of republishing. On the other hand, you're also going to be cutting down on your readership...
I'm a nobody with a nothing blog that no one cares to read. I don't make anything $$-wise, so if someone reposts my stuff, it's not like I'm losing. Having said that, if it were to happen continually without attribution, it would still sting. Is it that hard to take a quote and link to the place you got the info from? I try to do that ANY TIME I get so much as an IDEA from somewhere else, you know? So I understand the idea –- get rid of that stinging irritation.
However I don't summarize my blogs. Because I know for a fact that summarized blogs don't get clicked on. I know this because I don't do it. Having watched blogs I read change about over time, I can say that the summaries cause me to read less. That includes this site.
So what little readership I have (mostly friends, family, acquaintances) would dwindle if I did that. Sure I'd LIKE for them to read a summary and click over to the full text, but it's just annoying enough that people won't do it.
There's rude asses out on the web that don't get it. And no matter what, they're not going to get it. The question is how far do you go pissing off the people who matter to rid yourself of the nuisance bad apples? because unless you have something in high-demand, the damning you do for the bad apples will spill over to a large portion of the good ones, too.
Ask me to jump through hoops for an iPod Touch, maybe I will; ask me to jump through hoops for a carrot and I'll spit in your face instead. Because no matter what you tell yourself, if you're dangling carrots over fire, I'm just going to be insulted on some level. You make it more trouble than it's worth, and you get what you deserve: nothing.
It's a balance to be struck, and you have to weigh what you're offering.
Just to be clear, full feeds aren't going away here at duncandavidson.com this point. I continue to provide full, summary, and comment feeds and probably will for the foreseeable future as for me the balance is still in favor of sharing too much instead of too little. But it is a pisser of a problem and we do need to find win/win solutions for both content creators and consumers.
Last fall I was having a problem with my posts being scrapped with no attribution on travel sites with ads.
So, I made an announcement to my regular readers that I would be making only a summary available to the public but a private full feed to folks who emailed me.
About once every two months I remind folks on the summary feed that the private full feed is available for folks who email me.
This works and makes the folks who want a full feed happy and makes me happy as now the scrappers are only scraping a short summary.
Derek's feed is back to full posts. Just one point: Remember iPhone users (and people on similar devices). Switching from a feed reader to a browser is often cumbersome for them, or, in some cases, simply not an option at all.
I believe that, actually, a really successful blog can cut off RSS entirely. A few people will go away, but a vast majority will stay, because it's the content they are after, not the method of delivery.
As for a less successful blog, well, they too can cut off RSS entirely —they are not making any money off of the blog, so a drop in traffic volume by people not interested enough to read the actuall site does not matter.
Ken Rockwell, for example, the veritable Chuck Norris of Photography (with his own "facts" and all) has an old fashioned 90's style website, which he updates daily with new articles and stuff. He doesn't even provide a real RSS feed. Yet, tens of thousands of people go there everyday and read his stuff.
If you are interested in an alternate discussion on this subject the Securosis blog had a conversation going along a similar thread (including a link to this conversation).