Aggregation Consternation
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Saturday, May 20, 2006 at 04:38 PM [GMT-6]

I just discovered that the Gazette is being included in a new (to me, anyway) aggregation site called austinsnews.net. According to this "note to content providers," the site is in "early beta" and won't be officially live -- whatever that means -- until October. This means that the content, format, and everything else about the site could change before then. I suppose that the site could even cease to exist. Certainly one outcome is that the Gazette's stay on the list could be temporary.

They still have a few kinks to iron out. One of the most glaring is this sentence in the sidebar: That's what we're doing -- telling people about the best blogs, music and citizens content from Nashville. Nashville? That confused me at first, until I hacked the URL and visited nashvillesnew.net and found the same basic layout and approach...only it really is for Nashville. I assume the template simply got copied onto the Austin site.

I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. Obviously, we'll welcome any readers who might click over from the site, although I don't expect much traffic for a variety of reasons. And since I provide only excerpts of posts for the Gazette's RSS feeds, it's not as though austinsnews.net will get any benefit from the posts themselves (which, now that I think about it, is laughable to begin with). The thing that bothers me a bit is the copyright notice on each page of the site which implies that anything that appears on the webpage belongs to austinsnews.net, and we all know that's just not true.

Of course, this has been the concern about aggregators all along. They take content created by someone else and, well, aggregate it to presumably make it easier for consumers to find that content. My assumption is that austinsnews.net is not a work of charity...that the creators are interested in making a buck or two (and I'm a big fan of the profit motive). So the question becomes whether those whose content is being included should be concerned about sharing in any profits that our content helps generate. The site's "Note to Content Providers" addresses that...sort of:

So, if I'm reading this correctly, content providers might receive some sort of compensation, but only four per week will actually get anything from the website itself (anything else will come from reader tips).

This gets even more complicated for me, as founder of the Coalition of Unpaid Bloggers, a tongue-in-cheek non-organization that actually fronts a serious position: I do this blogging thing for many reasons, but getting paid -- or attempting to get paid -- is not one of them. What happens in the unlikely event that some of the Gazette's content actually generates some revenue via the aggregation site? (And what if the sun goes dark tomorrow?)

I'm willing to stick with the status quo and see how it plays out. I'm confident that they'll soon come to their senses and find some real content in place of the Gazette's posts. I mean, which part of "Content Free™" do they not understand?