socialmedian: Forget Disintermediation, Focus On Open Data Exchange

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Forget Disintermediation, Focus On Open Data Exchange

Source: Publishing 2.0

Apr 13, 2008

Summary

For years Digg has had an active comment community, where the comments are submitted and appear on the Digg landing page, rather than on the article linked from Digg. FriendFeed got into this game by making it possible to comment on content pulled in from multiple web services, where all the comments appear on FriendFeed, rather than on those services. Today, the tech blogosphere is debating a service called Shyftr that allows users to comment on the full text of blog posts, drawn from full text RSS feeds.

These are all forms of disintermediation on the web — disintermediation defines distribution on the web, made possible by RSS and hyperlinks.

The funny thing is that disintermediation is like a hall of mirrors — there’s really no end to it.

As Dave Winer posits:

There will of course eventually be the equivalent of Technorati, which assembles in one place, all the comments about each blog post.

In other words, somebody will come along and disintermediate FriendFeed, Shyftr, and all these other services by pulling all of the comments created on those services into

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Comments (2)

Jasongoldberg,

Apr 14, 2008

This is an interesting and good debate.

At social|median, our philosophy thus far is to allow our users to comment around only summaries of other people's content. We do not think that it is "fair use" to use RSS to reproduce the entire content for commercial purposes. (I think it is fair to say that social|median is currently a commercial purpose, even though we don't currently make any money).

In the coming weeks our intent is to make it even more clear to our users when/how they are linking to the original source of the content. We're also exploring ways to give content creators more brand exposure on social|median. We need to support content creators whether they are large publishers or individual contributors and we need to do it in a way that they feel good about.

In terms of comments, we have been thinking about potentially integrating services that would aggregate comments across multiple sites. I'm curious at to what our users think about such services?

Nishith,

Apr 14, 2008

"If Shyftr or FriendFeed or anyone else wants to enable their users to comment on my blog posts, I say fine — so long as I can easily display any comment created on their services over HERE."

I think that's what you can do with Disqus.