Virtual Economics: Big aggregators have little aggregators upon their backs to bite 'em

Description

There was a hoo-hah (yes, that's the correct technical term) before the weekend over blog aggregators taking comments away from original content sites [http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/04/should-fractured-feed-reader-comments.html]. If the conversation fragments, goes the theory, no-one (including the people who originally wrote the content) will be able to follow it and everyone will be the poorer.

Alan Patrick handily solves this problem [http://broadstuff.com/archives/848-Bitchin-about-Aggregator-posts-on-Techmeme.html] by proposing a "reverse aggregator" - if content aggregators can gather content from multiple blogs and conveniently assemble it in one place for the ostensible benefit of readers, presumably a similar service can gather comments from multiple feed aggregators and re-assemble them back at the original blog for the benefit of publishers. And to be honest that pretty much seems to be that - now we're just waiting for someone to build the thing, or more likely for someone like Disqus or Cocomment [http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/2008/04/12/how-we-knit-the-webosphere-together-lessons-so-far] to add it to their existing suite.

Original URL

http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/2008/04/big-aggregators.html

http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/2008/04/big-aggregators.html