Google May Add Comment Feature On Shared Reader Feeds

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1. Gabe
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 8:27 pm

   I’ll add the following:

   So far, new forms of “original content” Google is hosting have all been blocked off from other search services, specifically their hosted wire news stories and story comments, both of which were introduced in the past month. (E.g. Google can search Yahoo News hosted stories, but not the reverse.) Were that trend to continue, one would expect the same for these feed item comments.

   While these services are new and probably not totally thought out yet, Google is at least giving the appearance that it wants to build an ever expanding walled garden of content and compete with all world’s publishers. That may not be the case, that may not be their strategy. But it certainly looks like that might be the outcome, and to my knowledge they haven’t yet responded to any of the complaints on walling off their content.

2. Bryce
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 8:28 pm

   I agree with the idea to add a more ’social’ aspect to what is a solitary application. So definitely, the intent is good; however, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Google are infringing on copyright.

3. Duncan Riley
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 8:32 pm

   Gabe
   very, very good point.

4. Israel LHeureux
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 8:46 pm

   Hold on.

   “RSS is an XML-based document format for the syndication of web
   content so that it can be republished on other sites ”
   http://www.rssboard.org/rss-mi.....cation.txt

   The clear intent of RSS syndication is republishing. On other websites. If you don’t want your content syndicated, don’t have an RSS feed. It doens’t get simpler.

   If users choose to use aggregators to view blog or any other content that is openly published for *syndication* via RSS (not scraping, like google news), that’s fantastic for both the customer and the publisher.

   Imagine that Universal had their full videos freely available via RSS. Would you argue that YouTube is breaking copyright by republishing syndicated content. Of course not.

   In the same way, GReader’s link blogs are not breaking copyright laws either, but are providing a great service: people read great content from blogs they would have otherwise missed, and content creators can grow their readership.

   Here’s to more consumer choice and more ways to view great content. (Just be sure to honor the publisher’s licensing.)

5. Udi
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 8:54 pm

   We expect this archaic mentality from old media like the NY Times, but not from Techcrunch.

6. Rajesh Shakya
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 8:58 pm

   Addition of more and more web 2.0 features helps more people’s participation. Google’s effort for auto updates on new posts, publishing new contents and comments are commendable. Obviously breaking the barriers is not so easy but some one must do.

   Rajesh Shakya
   http://www.rajeshshakya.com

7. cori
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 9:07 pm

   While I agree that the Gabe’s point about the walled-garden aspect of some of Google’s “properties” is disturbing, I don’t necessarily see the comment idea as a problem - I’d very much love to be able to leave a short meta-comment about why I think something is worthy of sharing - similar to what Rojo used to offer.

   I can understand why some publishers might be concerned about a full-fledged comment system associated with shared items - it might dilute the conversation taking place on the publisher’s site, but it’s not at all clear to me that that’s what Google’s talking about, and a single comment from the sharer provides context without disrupting the conversation elsewhere.

8. Rob La Gesse
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

   I think the Goog is quickly reaching the Tipping Point - the point when what they are learning about me (and how they use it) scares me enough that what they offer me is no longer compelling.

   Not yet… but soon. “Don’t be evil”. Right. Don’t redefine evil every time it suits you either.

   Rob

9. Sean
   

   September 11th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

   Agree 100% with #5

10. Stephen Chan
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 9:30 pm

    Have a look at the online news reader at http://vooba.com which combines social elements of Digg/Reddit with RSS feeds. Google reader is a great app, but it becomes a real chore scanning hundreds of entries in the dozens of feeds that I subscribe to.

    For people concerned about their privacy, Vooba doesn’t require any login.
    Being all text, it’s optimized for speed, not flash.

    For Techcrunch readers, that RSS feed is built in.

11. Sam
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 9:52 pm

    Personally I use spoonfeedr.com .. they had search for RSS long (over a year ago) before Google Reader and also lets you publish searches and collections of feeds as new feeds. Pretty cool stuff.

12. Wolke Snow
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

    > So-called link blogs in Reader already break copyright …

    TechCrunch — fighting the holy war against RIAA et al. and now this?

    I’m sure Scoble (who compiles an excellent link blog) would argue otherwise.

13. ShoeMoney
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 10:15 pm

    Duncan great article. Love your work.

14. sesh
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 10:22 pm

    I am looking forward to the day that I can add a comment to a Google Reader item that I’m sharing with friends. Why I’m sharing it, whether I think I agree with it, whether I think it’s funny, etc…

15. Joshua Prowse
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 10:25 pm

    “Google Reader’s share tools on the other hand republish full blogs post for all to read without obtaining permission from blog publishers.”

    That’s right - people should need to get permission from authors before they can link to them. And deep linking!? Don’t even get me started. And what’s with people being able to comment on the information that I publish without my permission!? If people want to comment on what I say, they should be obligated to do so under my terms. Think of the chaos if anybody could cite anything every written!

16. hwsquaredcubed
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    I think you’re dead wrong on this and I agree with Cori, #7, above.

    I have a feed of my Google Reader shared items on my blog, and I can’t understand how my adding a comment to a shared item infringes upon anyone’s copyright any more than my creating an entirely new blog post, linking to the original item, and commenting to my heart’s desire in that post. As another commenter mentioned above, if you don’t want this result for your content, don’t syndicate it.

    Also, I think the potentially most significant point of the Google Blogoscoped article is that Google Reader will “very soon” begin recommending items based on other user’s behavior. Goodbye Digg et al.

17. Austin Storm
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 11:00 pm

    As much as I want to be able to read comments and post comments without leaving the comfort of Reader (some sites have clunky designs, and I’m still waiting for a single sign-in), but I understand how the current arrangement drives me to the original site.

18. mario romero
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 11:15 pm

    wow Duncan!, are you being sarcastic or did you use to work as RIAA lawyer?… trips my mind how you would not considered that fair use… especially considering techcrunch feeds get published with banner ads

19. Jake
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 11:22 pm

    Stupid, stupid, stupid.

20. Robert Scoble
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 11:41 pm

    Duncan and Mike: here’s my reply (I keep one of the largest link blogs on the Internet, with more than 300,000 items gathered over the past 12 months): http://scobleizer.com/2007/09/.....-are-evil/

    If you don’t want me to link blog to you, let me know and I’ll stop. I’ve been doing it for 12 months in a very public way, and assume you were OK with it. Why not say something 12 months ago? Why today?

21. Matt
    

    September 11th, 2007 at 11:55 pm

    Oh please Scoble. His issue isn’t with what you are currently doing, it is what the proposed roadmap to Google Reader will allow people to do in the future. Way to find offense though. It is quickly becoming your defining trait.

22. Robert Scoble
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 12:04 am

    Matt: really?

    I read this:

    >>RSS feeds are in the most provided for personal use/ viewing and are not provided (unless otherwise specified) for someone to use that information to republish on their own site in full, be that powered by Google Reader, Blogger or WordPress.

    And see my link blog being talked about here.

    How can you honestly say Duncan isn’t talking about my link blog here?

23. PJ
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 12:06 am

    Commenting about the article vs. a suggestion to read the article are two different things. Suggesting a link to a friend with a small comment might actually prompt him to pay more attention to check out the post. How is it copyright infringing?

24. Jens
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 12:08 am

    I loved reading this so much I had to shared it through Google Reader!!!

25. Edwin Khodabakchian
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 12:09 am

    How is what being described fundamentally different from what you do when using delicious to comment and share a web url? If you take a look at Google Reader’s sharing mechanism you will see that the resulting feed retains all the information of the source (content url, feed information, web site information, ads, etc…): it is a simple filtering mechanism and annotation (re-bloging) seems the natural next step: simple word of mouth mechanism.

    The real problem that needs to be addressed in this area is a mechanism what would allow publishers to get revenue for their syndicated content beyond what FeedBurner enables today.

26. Robert Scoble
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 12:14 am

    Jens: what’s funny is I shared it through Google Reader too.

    According to the Google Reader Shared Items Application in Facebook it already is the most shared item in the past six hours. So, we’re not alone.

27. mario romero
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 12:15 am

    also duncan there are alternate ways to get feed users back to your site apart from the obvious and dreadful incomplete feed posts… slashdot for example published full posts on their feeds but the actual “link” the item is talking about is not present, you need to at least visit slashdot to RTFA..

28. PJ
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 12:37 am

    @Duncan I agree with your argument about Google share tools. Letting people republish the entire post on a public domain page could be a serious problem for content owners.

    My argument in #23 was that bookmarking and sharing of links with limited content (not the entire post) and comments for recommendation, and possibly the shared items page not being on the public domain could indeed help the content creator.

29. Philipp Lenssen
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 1:31 am

    > The clear intent of RSS syndication is republishing. On
    > other websites. If you don’t want your content syndicated,
    > don’t have an RSS feed. It doens’t get simpler.

    The Google Blogoscoped RSS full feed includes the copyright element (for which I picked a Creative Commons license). So, even by RSS definition, that should be respected, right? I think full republication, if not compliant to the copyright element, should only be in fair use. Fair might be, at least that’s how I think of it: republishing the full post but disallowing robots to crawl the republication (this is what Google does AFAIK). Or: republishing a snippet, and allowing robots in, too, for re-indexing. As soon as full posts on the other get republished AND robots are let in, the republication — perhaps a spam farm — might start to index better for smaller, newer blogs (the problem are NOT bigger blogs, as they got a natural shadowblog defense via high PageRank).

    Of course, there are too many shadowblogs to get into this discussion with each of them, so you will just end up living with the reality of smaller aggregators doing whatever they want anyway, including making it look like a) your content belongs to them, and originates with them, or b) as if you would be the author working for them. (Google Reader is a bigger player so if necessary in the future, we could get into a better argument with Google.)

    I think the matter of the fact is that the whole purpose and functioning of RSS is very much undefined (or at least, no single standard is widely accepted, as above arguments and counter-arguments show), and that this will cause a growing debate in the future years. RSS/Atom is more and more becoming a full HTML replacement — with ads, images, etc. — and then you will start to wonder how it actually differs from HTML, and why we need to maintain two separate content branches on our servers.

    Sidenote: XHTML2 already allows you to nicely RSS-ify your normal base HTML document. HTML is and always was machine-readable and layout-independent, too, so there’s no barrier for displaying it in RSS readers — we just forget this due to HTML-language abuse by certain frameworks (think 1990s Frontpage). Maybe one day we unify the format within XHTML2, and as any pseudo-unification, that will cause feed readers to do not less, but more work, just as adding the “nicer” Atom format to feeds causes more work for parsers (because they *still* need to support all other and older formats anyway!)… oh well

30. James Corbett
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 1:40 am

    Duncan, I’m really surprised that you haven’t seen that the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Last January I started writing about “Google ReWriter” -

    “…. blog posting, commenting and social bookmarking are various forms of the same thing - annotation…. we must shake off the page-centric mindset. The ‘Wide Web was about reading pages, the Live Web is about annotating microchunks (e.g. permalinks). While we tend to categorize our annotation according to the point of submission, each form is essentially the same. Whether to your own blog, someone else’s blog or a third party note-taking site it’s the same mechanism. Different context but same mechanism.What sense does it make that I have to open my Performancing plug-in to blog, visit a blogger’s web page to comment and invoke a del.icio.us pop-up to take a note? None! I should be able to perform each annotation from within my aggregator - a single unified interface to the Live Web. And I’m betting that’s exactly what Google ReWriter will become.”

    I followed up in February -

    “…. how will we publish these microformatted comments? With our Google ReWriters (or other 2nd generation aggregator/annotators). We can already use Google Reader to annotate (tag) posts, just press ‘T’. A new version will allow us to comment, just press ‘C’. These comments will be microformatted and tossed back into our uniFeeds, there to be scanned and recombined back into the discussion flow by any microformat aware aggregator.”

    Not meaning to blow my own trumpet but it’s been very obvious to many that this was on the cards. And I’m horrified that you should ask Google to put the genie back in the bottle.

31. Danny Sullivan
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 2:56 am

    Google Reader isn’t republishing anything more than what’s put out in a feed. So don’t put out a full feed, and problem solved.

    Philipp is right that even when you do put out a full feed, copyright should be respected. Google Reader (or Bloglines or any number of other services you could poke at) are probably fine reprinting the feed in its entirety for a particular reader. Few would argue that the feed isn’t intended for just that.

    But reprinting an entire post online, just because it’s in the feed that way? I don’t know that copyright law would back that up. I’m sure I wouldn’t expect my feed to get reprinted by anyone (though I know that would probably happen).

    What we could use is some machine-readable system similar to the robots.txt system within feeds to flag automatically whether a full-text feed can be freely reprinted or not (some do want this). Then reader mechanisms can know what amount to reprint if they want to do the comments thing; then others who use tools to put feeds on their site can have the “good” tools automatically do the right thing. Still won’t stop plenty of other people, but it’s a start.

32. Robert Scoble
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 2:59 am

    Danny: is Sphinn.com available in full-text? I can only get partial text feeds and it greatly pisses me off. I still am a subscriber but I share a LOT less stuff than if I had full-text feeds.

33. Yohay
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 3:31 am

    I think that the current behavior of Google News is a fair play.
    Adding comments is nice when the original publisher disallows comments. But as a blogger, I’d like the comments to be on my blog post, and not on any aggregation site.

34. Michel Rijnders
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 3:39 am

    My god, this discussion was already there 10 years ago and seems antic to me. Just don’t make the full feed available. But that is no option because that full feed and republishing drives a lot of traffic to the site. You can’t profit in both ways.

35. Andy Beard
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 3:49 am

    Google Reader strips out redistribution information within feeds. How can that be looked on as republishing the content legally?

    http://andybeard.eu/2007/09/op.....eader.html

    In that article I went into detail about the methods already available for content owners to control their feed content and how it is reused, and the blatant disregard of Google to support the efforts of others.

36. Danny Sullivan
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 4:26 am

    It’s not, Robert. Actually, I suppose it is. Sphinn topics are mainly links to news stories and short paragraph intros about them, so all that usually fits in the feed. Comments/discussion on stories come later, and there’s a comments feed for those. Eventually, you’ll be able to take a feed per story.

    Search Engine Land is a better example. Very short items go out in full; longer items go out with summaries. And I understand that pisses you off But as a publisher, I find it causes less hassle with other people just lifting some 5,000 analysis I’ve done on an issue because they see it in a feed and assume that’s fair game.

    http://daggle.com/061003-113032.html is my download on the full versus partial debate. I know readers would prefer full; I know it means I might get actually read by more people, but there are also good reasons why a publisher might not do it (and I wish publishers got more respect if they decide against it, rather than being made out as foolish old curmudgeons by those who largely do NOT earn a living by publishing).

    A tool to flag automatically within a feed reprint permissions would be very useful. It’s the type of thing that might influence me to switch over.

37. Sean McGee
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 6:36 am

    If you’re so worried about copyright infringement, stop publishing your RSS feed. Really Simple Syndication.

    What part of Syndication is there that’s hard to understand?

    If you publish an RSS feed, you are giving up your right to be exclusive in delivering your content. You’re asking to be syndicated.

    As long as credit and/or a link back to TechCrunch is given, there is no infringement, no matter how many comments are posted to the link blog.

38. Ioannus de Verani
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 6:50 am

    As someone said ealier, the point of RSS is republishing.

    As for the comments, I don’t like the idea of having comments in two places (Google and the blog). Maybe they could think up a feature where Google Reader merely pushes comments to the original blog. There could be a “comment” button next to “share” and “email”, where you could type a comment. Also, I would love to be able to view existing comments right from Google Reader. Now, I speak as someone wanting to improve productivity, not increase page views for my ad-supported site, so this might not work for everyone. They could make it so that people can choose whether their feed in GReader has this functionality.

39. dean @ t.a.m.s.y.
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 7:13 am

    Duncan,

    I think you’re misunderstanding what Google Reader means here, or something. If Google gives users the ability to comment on links they share, it doesn’t add to one’s ability to republish content; it doesn’t really affect that at all.

    Google simply appears to be considering adding a functionality that del.icio.us already offers: The ability to comment on the feed items you choose to share. If someone wants to share every single TechCrunch post, and comment on them, it doesn’t mean they’d be republishing or stealing TechCrunch’s content. It just means they’d be linking to TechCrunch a lot, and commenting.

    This is what a Google Reader shared items page looks like. Note that it’s not a public page; I can’t edit it. Also note the lack of ads. I also share those items via a widget on my blog’s sidebar — but I’m not publishing the complete items. The Reader widget only publishes headlines.

    As of now, I can’t comment on the items I share, which is a bit frustrating; just because I’m sharing an item doesn’t mean I agree with the opinions expressed, and often I’d like to be able to add a note of clarification or response. I hope Google adds this functionality, and soon; I was already considering switching to del.icio.us or another link sharing service, for exactly that reason.

    But in short, I can’t see how any of this is related to the issues you’re worrying about.

40. dean @ t.a.m.s.y.
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 7:18 am

    P.S.: Okay, I think maybe I get what your misunderstanding is here. You write:

    “If Google offers a comment service on ’shared’ items they are in effect creating copyright infringing blogs; after all they’ll have chronological entries and comments so they’ll look like blogs, even if they don’t provide a fully customizable CMS.”

    The proposed comments feature isn’t meant to imply an open forum, like these comments right here on TechCrunch. The only person who’d be able to comment would be the individual sharing the item. Again, think del.icio.us.

    (Unless I’m misunderstanding the concept myself… but I don’t think I am.)

41. TanNg
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 8:04 am

    #38. Point of gun is killing, but it is legal for you to kill
    #Duncan. Here AdBlock and AdBlock Plus come. Just adblock Google and they will learn to respect your revenue.

42. bfos7216
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 8:06 am

    Woah! I had to read the second half of this post three times just to make sure you weren’t being sarcastic.

    I’m shocked and disappointed with TechCrunch this morning.

    Most users have been waiting for comments on shared items for years, not to republish blogs. But, to, you know, leave comments on shared items. You want to limit this functionality because of a handful of people may use it as one of MANY ways to infringe copyright. How very RIAA of you.

43. bfos7216
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 8:09 am

    Here’s another thought. I’d love to share this post with my friends who subscribe to my shared items with a comment that I completely disagree. But, I can’t leave that comment, so I can’t share it. I don’t want my friends to think that I actually agree with this.

44. Thejesh GN
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 8:10 am

    @Ioannus de Verani point 38.
    Yes. even I dont like comments at two places for the same post. Google need to make an effort to publish back the comments. I have blogged about the same
    http://www.thejeshgn.com/2007/.....iscussion/

45. Thejesh GN
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 8:12 am

    @Andy Beard Good point (35). Google Reader republish need to have links to original post.

46. Andy Beard
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 8:43 am

    bfos7216 (42) - Why not start a blog or just send a private email with a link

    Thejesh GN (44) - Google Reader does have links to original post, even clean links if people don’t use Feedburner tracking

    If you guys really just want to comment or read full feeds use this script in firefox

    http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9455

    If/When it is possible for content owners to specify how their content can be shared, more content will become available via RSS, and it will be useful for more type of content.

    The current situation of Google not only ignoring machine readable instructions regarding sharing of content, but also stripping it out just isn’t acceptable.

47. Modern Bizzle
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 9:38 am

    After reading through all the comments and the original Google Blogoscoped post, it seems to me the “comment feature” is more like an annotation similar to when you share an item in Facebook.

    However, I think there is an opportunity for Google to make “real” commenting way better. When I want to leave a comment on one of my friend’s blogs in Google reader, I just click the email link, type in their email, and send them my comments. This is an amazingly quick way to leave feedback without having to leave the Reader interface.

    Now obviously my comments won’t appear on their site but this is SUCH a better experience I can’t help but wonder if it could be replicated for traditional comments.

48. Rocky Agrawal
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 10:44 am

    This brings up the question of the relationship between bloggers and commenters. Many times the comments are as enlightening (or more) than the original blog post.

    I’d love to be able to aggregate my own comments from across the blogs I comment in and have them available for readers of my blog. Trackbacks were one way of handling them but many blog owners have turned them off because of trackback spam.

    I’d also love to have commenter names identifiable so that comments from people I trust (e.g. Danny, Gabe) are highlighted and comments from those I never want to see again (e.g. Fake Steve Ballmer) are automatically hidden — regardless of whether it’s here, at SEL, Cutts, Kedrosky etc. Of course this would ideally be paired with a mechanism for me to verify that the person actually left the comment. (Click to the aggregation page hosted by them.)

49. bfos7216
    

    September 12th, 2007 at 11:27 am

    Andy Beard (46) - Because I don’t want the hassle of maintaining a blog. I’ve tried it, and it’s just too much work. Even when using the “blog this” buttons. It’s not “hard”, it’s just more than I want to do. That being, just pressing Shift-S, fill in a comment if I want, and hit Enter.

    Sending an email isn’t as simple because then I have to remember everyone who is interested in what I’m sharing.

50. james
    

    September 13th, 2007 at 8:51 pm

    So republishing RSS feeds is a problem but republishing Artists’ music isn’t. Which is it open web or publishers have rights?

51. alan p
    

    September 13th, 2007 at 11:57 pm

    Related to this…we have just been told that our blog - and many others, probably TC as well - is being picked up via RSS and the posts then onsold to corporates as part of a marketwatch service. We run a Creative Commons licence.

    Any thoughts on that one?

52. Spreto
    

    September 14th, 2007 at 9:25 am

    Nice ..

53. mark
    

    September 14th, 2007 at 12:00 pm

    Auugh.. I’ve been permitting comments on Feed Results for months now (www.seekng.com).. Google is a monster I am but one dude, with one server

54. cam balkon
    

    September 14th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

    very nice

55. nina
    

    September 14th, 2007 at 11:02 pm

    great news.

    http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-valid.....hopyop.com

56. Keneth
    

    September 16th, 2007 at 9:56 pm

    Test

57. Ralf
    

    September 24th, 2007 at 9:52 am

    The “issue” (depending on your point of view) is that this commenting “feature” is already existing today in Google Reader:

    Just press the “Email” button in Google Reader, type your “comment” into the mail-body and send this mail to your “Mail to Blogger” Address (how-to-enable: http://help.blogger.com/bin/an.....swer=41452).
    Done.

    Proof here: http://ralfs-view.blogspot.com.....re-on.html

    Can it get much easier then that?

58. TopGames
    

    September 24th, 2007 at 9:10 pm

    TopGames your No.1 game website Play 2200 online funnygames for free and fun. Play arcade,action,sport,skill,flash, adventure and become a video game tester.

59. Agrrr
    

    September 26th, 2007 at 11:34 am

    cool

60. hgj
    

    September 26th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    http://www.meta0fx.com
    forex فارکس

61. Jason
    

    September 29th, 2007 at 10:36 am

    So… what about tumblr? Doesn’t that fall into the same category?

62. Jan
    

    September 30th, 2007 at 6:39 am

    Nice graphic, great fun to be Gladiator. Amuse people of Rome.
    http://s3.gladiatus.cz/game/c.php?uid=51197

63. realgt
    

    October 11th, 2007 at 7:50 am

    lol @ “So-called link blogs in Reader already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators.”

    most ignorant statement i’ve ever read

64. Joe
    

    March 15th, 2008 at 1:51 am