BlogNetNews is another group that seems to be trying to make some money off of aggregating local content. They're now aggregating the same blogs that cvilleblogs.com collects. But will any of this actually correspond to higher amounts of traffic?
I'm now part of two organizations that use local blogs to reach people. I created the Charlottesville Podcasting Network and now work as program officer for Charlottesville Tomorrow. Both entities would benefit from extra traffic, as it would be good to reach out to new eyes in our attempts to increase public participation in civic and cultural society.
But, I worry about groups that suck up feeds without asking for permission. I hope that it will be easy to determine if this does result in extra eyeballs, or if it will just mean the eyeballs currently engaged are just shifting the way in which they receive the feed.
2 comments:
Sean, I also wonder about aggregators. They serve a reasonable purpose when they have a conceptual base, I think; for example, I plan to scrape data from several related blogs that I publish. I 'spose the geographically based aggregators make some sense, but primarily if they generate readers for the original sites.
Of course, once one publishes a post, it is out there in the wild...sigh.
I wonder whether aggregators that scrape only a limited amount of the content and then send readers to the original would be better.
JohnL,
BlogNetNews.com only takes the first 50 words of posts and includes two links back to the original in every excerpt -- as well as adding new data about what is going on the net, targeted search capability and a direct-link headline feed that lets bloggers promote each other.
The other C-Ville aggregator takes and reprints whole posts. You'll also notice that the content isn't quite the same. BNN doesn't take blogs that are essentially advertising.
Post a Comment