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Aggregating, sharing feeds has bloggers agitated

The Shyftr service ties feeds and social networking features together in a way that has some prominent bloggers screaming foul.

Bloggers screamed about theft and content scraping amid the wider availability of Shyftr. The service lets a user pull a bunch of feeds into one place, and share those collected feeds with other visitors.

"It's not the conversations being hosted somewhere else that bothers me, it's that there are a new crop of services which would not otherwise exist without republishing someone else’s content without the original author’s explicit permission," Tony Hung fumed at Deep Jive Interests.

"I’ve found that by being open with my content a lot of good has come back to me," Robert Scoble said in counterpoint. "The era when bloggers could control where the discussion of their stuff took place is totally over."

Dilbert creator Scott Adams already solved this problem. His widely-read Dilbert blog used to arrive as a full feed in whatever reader I happened to be using. Opera, Google, Newsgator, the content appeared intact for my reading pleasure.

Fandom for a syndicated columnist, author, speaker, and restaurant owner wasn't enough. As he, or his advisors, realized, all these fans were evil people reading the feed and not visiting the blog, thus missing potential ad views or clicks.

Adams discarded the full feeds in favor of partial ones. He likely drew a lot more ire for deleting the blog posts and comments that fed his most recent book, done at the behest of the publisher.

That simple action requires interested readers to click through and arrive at his blog. If ad revenue increased as a result, there's no way the change can be viewed as a failure.

If more bloggers and publishers feel threatened by Shyftr and other aggregators, expect their feeds to revert to partial ones faster than one can say CPM revenue. That's an inconvenience to those who prefer full content in feeds, but the publisher's preferences should be respected if a full feed publisher switches to partial ones.