Comments on: When Does Social ‘Aggregation’ Become ‘Stealing’?

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:36:26 +0000

I am pretty much with Michael on this, and when I saw lots of comments on Tamars blog from other places recently, I almost wrote something.

Even worse was the plugin is written such that all those comments also come through to me as an email subscriber to the comments on the post.

Yes it can be abused. Just find someone using Backtype and there are certainly ways to get all their comment subscribers to receive tons and tons of spam about blue pills which is then email spam.

ANother issue of course is what is fair to the commenter. It is bad enough monitoring a conversation at a place where you have commented, but Backtype adds another (maybe many) location to the mix.
If you imagine a situation where every blog had backtype, and you linked to 40 in a roundup post, comments on that post are going to be scattered everywhere.
What happens if it is tons of negative sentiment about a brand you represent now appearing in the comments of 40 blogs, not just one.

Blogs tend to outrank social media sites like Friendfeed, Twitter etc, even for the comments.

It is not just Backtype, I discovered some pretty nasty privacy issues with Disqus. Maybe it is time for commenters to own their comments 100% and have total control of where and if they get displayed.

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:22:48 +0000

That’s fine. Just wanted to confirm that we’re all on the same page. Thanks for chiming in.

FWIW, after performing my cleanup, I don’t think I left any Outspoken Media comments on my blog at all, since they weren’t relevant to the blog discussion.

Having to now moderate these comments now is a pain, but your concerns are very justified, which is exactly why I opted to do so.

By: Rae Hoffman

Rae Hoffman — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:12:34 +0000

Actually, Tamar, I get how the plugin works. That was simply a mistype on my part because I was typing fast and was busy most of that day driving to Troy, so I didn’t re-read it after posting it to notice the error.

“So Lisa, in all three cases, you linked to me, and that’s why my blog pulled in your comments”

If you read the post above, it’s pretty apparent that we get how it works.

Because we linked to a post written by Tamar, she’s using the plugin to pull in ALL the comments that people left on our blog post that linked to her.

I still dislike our comments showing on your or anyone else’s blog. If it were up to me, we wouldn’t link to sites using them. I think it amounts to people stealing our content and causing confusion. But, luckily for anyone using the plugin, Lisa rules the blog.

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:01:47 +0000

Right, I get that. I’m just making sure that the tool is understood, since it’s not easy to hijack a conversation.

By: Lisa Barone

Lisa Barone — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:59:08 +0000

I can’t speak for Rae on this one (nor will I attempt to), but we (really, I) absolutely linked to you because of the value of your posts. I think you constantly provide some of the best information on social media and I link to you because I think its relevant to our audience here. I think the problem for everyone is the way Backtype handles pulling in comments, not necessarly the bloggers/communities who use it.

By: Roy Reshef

Roy Reshef — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:27:53 +0000

To start with, I am with Michael Gray on this one. Assume shop owners, who also do business on their own website. They may have an online shop there, or may have revenues from ads for related products which they do not carry in the shop. That tweet you quoted, “businesses want customers, not web visitors” is nonsense, sorry. Web visitors are also customers, and web traffic is also business.
What does big G? They sum up the relevant information of the shop, so that actually the web visitor doesn’t even have to visit the shop website. They collect the nice revenues from THEIR ads. The shop owners are trapped in catch 22 – they cannot prevent G from crawling their website, that’s suicide in SERP. And G presents enough info so that people don’t have to visit their websites.
As for backtype, this plugin is the child of a sick mind. Very often you see blogs which link to other blogs as part of the introduction / background information / footnote etc. In all of these cases aggregation of comments is pretty much irrelevant. I do not know the stats, but I think that the cases that blogs really drill down to the same issue as other linked blogs are a relatively low percentage of the total amount of links in blogs. And this plugin has no way to differentiate between one URL to another. So in most cases user experience only degrades due to aggregation of irrelevant comments. Not to mention that it can start blogger-wars of the kind “I won’t link to your blog even though I should do so, because you will steal my comments and boost your link profile” and this kind of BS.
I’d leave aside the interesting question whose intellectual property are these very words which I’m typing right now (if anyone would like to claim ownership ha ha :). Is it mine? Is it yours? Is it fair game for anyone to capture and republish? I even bothered to read your comment policy, it says their “Do not violate… intellectual property rights in your comment” but it doesn’t answer this question. It’s way too late now to dive into that. Good night.

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:19:37 +0000

btw, someone alerted me to Rae's tweet on the matter. I just want to clarify one thing, since Rae has it backwards. This plugin cannot be easily gamed. This plugin ONLY pulls in comments when you link to another blog that has the BackType plugin. So Lisa, in all three cases, you linked to me, and that's why my blog pulled in your comments, since BackType assumes that the discussion is relevant. When I link to you, I don't see the comments. That means nobody can just start linking to Outspoken Media and start automatically adding comments just like a rabbit is pulled out of a hat. It would be pretty lousy if you can generate comments that easily. You have to deserve the link, and only when you get linked to do you get to see the discussion. Here's hoping people won't not link to me because of how I want to pull in the comments. ;)

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:58:49 +0000

Tim, this is a problem that SEOs or those immersed in SEO would have, yes.

By: Tim Staines

Tim Staines — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:53:26 +0000

If the comments aren’t showing up until after the conversation is played out on a post, they’re not being used to “enhance the conversation” at all . . . at that point they’re just being used bolster the comment content on a post that had otherwise seen it’s full potential (or close to it).

Just playing devils advocate a little here; it would be easy to infer that BackType comments are being used to show the SE’s page freshness instead of the centralized conversation that is claimed in one breath and written off as post discussion in the next.

By: Lisa Barone

Lisa Barone — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:19:20 +0000

In fact, these comments show up after the discussion on my blog posts end, typically, so there’s no conversation to hijack at that point and the comments aren’t exposed to the people who you suspect would be looking at them.

That’s actually an important point, I think. If the comments aren’t showing up until after the natural conversation has died anyway, then there’s much less risk of having a thread “hijacked” via the plugin.

Again, maybe I’m the anomaly, but I’m using it to try to centralize the relevant conversation. That’s an impossible feat, but I’m using what’s available to me to highlight related discussion.

I think ARE an anomaly. :) You’re using the plugin to enhance the conversation and you cherry pick the comments that are actually relevant to the thread and get rid of the rest. If we had a blogosphere full of Tamars, this wouldn’t even be an issue. But most people aren’t as committed or as caring about their communities/other communities.