They Own the Aggregator, Now (They Think) They Own the Content

This post is not about anything medical, but rather about the direction of blogging. We are in a new business and, as we go along, we have to figure out the rules of that business, for ourselves and for others as well, it seems.
Here’s the issue at hand. Take a look at this page at the San Francisco Chronicle. Doesn’t it look like something written and photographed by the newspaper’s correspondent? Not at all! It is an entire post from Shortcut, a personal blog about travel in Europe. The display of this post at the newspaper’s website is syndicated and presented by BlogBurst, a new service of Pluck Corporation, an Austin, TX company.
Our blog has also been invited to join BlogBurst and we agreed. However, as some time passed and a more careful consideration on our part, we realized we are not that thrilled with the arrangement. It seems that the folks at Pluck (as well as folks at the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and the Austin American-Statesman) take advantage of bloggers. The implied selling point of the service for the bloggers is that by providing the content (the entire content!) for syndication, bloggers will get traffic in return. Unfortunately, it seems to us, that for a regular reader of online newspapers, there is little incentive to visit the original blog site if an entire story is already displayed. Moreover, there are more stories available to read on the newspaper site all handpicked by professional editors.
Meanwhile, Pluck and the newspapers are sharing the revenue from advertising that is displayed on the page with the syndicated blog content, all while the original site gets neither significant additional traffic nor revenue.
But wait, there’s more. The pictures displayed on the newspaper’s site are deeplinked (or hotlinked) straight from the blog. Since the picture file is stored on the blog’s server, the San Francisco Chronicle, et al. are using the blog’s bandwidth to distribute content to thousands of newspaper readers. Stealing bandwidth through hotlinking is one of the nastier offences committed on the internet. In addition, due to this practice, the newspapers are endangering themselves – they might be in for a nasty surprise: an unhappy blogger can always substitute the picture file on his server and display a political anti-newspaper message instead. The newspaper has no control over what picture is displayed once it starts hotlinking.
We did raise these issues with Pluck in their official blog and have received a number of responses (see here.) We believe that Pluck has a great idea – one that might benefit bloggers, newspapers and make Pluck successful. However, maybe Pluck and the bloggers need to reassess the rules of this syndication business. We believe that taking advantage of bloggers is not the way to go.
What do you think?
Update (05/05/2006): To note, BlogBurst does ask bloggers to sign up to the service, and those that don’t want to have their content syndicated don’t have to participate. We are not claiming that there are copyright violations, but that the service is not providing the value that bloggers are looking for.
Update (05/05/2006): It seems to us that the practice of hotlinking images is not discussed in the BlogBurst’s service agreement, and thus is clearly unfair.