Addicted to check your blog stats? I am. Stats on Wordpress don’t just tell you how many hits you’ve gotten but where they come from. Recently there have been some hits from a source I didn’t recognize, Outside.in.

Tracking back to the Outside.in site, it was plain that The Broad Brush blog was being aggregated there, along with others from St. Louis. Checking the FAQ revealed that bloggers opt in. I’d never opted in The Broad Brush blog.

The site did provide an easy to locate link for contacting them. I requested to have the blog removed. Outside.in representative, Esther, has already gotten back to me. Let’s see what she says.

Hi Todd,

We automatically scan RSS feeds of great local bloggers and show only the headline and first 200 words of the story – with the intent of driving traffic to the blogger. We’ve sent you 27
visits since the beginning of November from the Outside.in core site and our Neighborhood News page on STLToday:

http://www.stltoday.com/neighborhoodnews

We’re working on removing your feed from our system now, and once it’s removed, we and STLToday will no longer be sending you traffic. I’ll let you know when your stories and links are down.

If you change your mind and decide you’d like to continue receiving traffic from us and STLToday, please let me know.

All the best,
Esther

The tone, to me, is very off-putting. It sounds like they were doing the blog a favor by including it in the automatic aggregation. There is something more irksome to me though, the part about STLToday.

STLToday is the St. Louis Post Dispatch online version. In recent years the Post has tried several channels to aggregate St. Louis blogs into the STLToday site as content.  This is an effort to steal the search engine juice from the blog posts and avoid spending time and money creating content. Several St. Louis bloggers argued against this practice, including me. It seems they’ve found another way to do it.

Interestingly, Outside.in, makes no mention on their site about affiliation with STLToday.

Rant off for now. Cheers and heads up out there.

     Facebook is taking charge of your online presence.  Mashable claims they are making it into a FriendFeed clone.  But what’s really happening? You can read what Facebook’s blog says, but let me share my thoughts.

     Let’s take just a couple of sentences from that post.

Your profile will automatically update when you upload a video to YouTube, rate last night’s episode of The Office on Hulu, and so on. If you have a personal blog, you can enter the URL in and a Mini-Feed story will be published every time you write a new post.

     Hmm. Remind you of some Facebook applications you might already have installed?  There are already plug in applications that let you import your feed, e.g. Flog Blog.  It makes me wonder if they realize they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

     Aside from aggregation of your online self, it appears they are stealing the thunder of their online partners.  Up until now you could already bring all of your various feeds into Facebook either through partner applications or third party applications.  Both of which allowed those sites to post ads.  What will happen now?

     Perhaps Facebook envisions you freely sharing all of your feeds, drawing in your readers and selling ads right there.  Ads that you don’t see any revenue from. I expect the next thing you’ll see is an increase of ‘relevant’ ads based on the material shared.  Can Friendfeed do a better job than Googld Adwords?

     What’s your theory?  Are you with Mashable? Got your own idea?  Hate Facebook already?  Can’t wait to add all of your feeds?

The adventures in blogging continue.  Blogging and aggregation is a hot topic in St. Louis lately.  If you blog, you’ve dealt with the up and downsides of it.  If your blog has RSS, there’s a good chance someone is aggregating it.  Maybe that happens inside an RSS reader, but it can also happen at a blog aggregator site.

What’s the harm? Those sites can be both helpful and harmful. Some aggregators capture the entire content of the RSS feed and redisplay it on the site.  Kinder ones showcase the blog feed with human designed setups.

What can you do to get it right? Create your own aggregator of course!

Some of us bloggers are getting together, forming a project to talk about making a better aggregator.  I can’t give up the site yet. It’s still very bare bones.  Currently a team is being assembled.

It’s stirring up in St. Louis. Here’s a little background for that too.

What are you doing about your blog and aggregation?

So you start blogging. Next step, you’ve got your RSS feed being distributed. Heck, you probably didn’t even have to sign up for that. That RSS feed, you don’t realize it at first, but lots of folks are latching onto it to read your posts. They are subscribing themselves in a tool called a feed reader. If they want, they can still visit your site, but now they can save themselves the trip. And life goes on.

But one day, your readership tapers off as well as your RSS subscribers. The clicks go down, and you begin to wonder if your content sucks or what. Being certain it can’t be your writing or lack of goods as a blogger you start searching around.

It’s then you find it; there’s a site aggregating your content. A site that is taking your feed and posting it right back onto the front of their homepage. Not just an aggregator clearly showing that you’re a contributor but not related to their company, but an aggregator selling ads on the side.

So you step back and think. Is this adding value to your site or stealing it. Yeah, you’re just not 100% sure it’s legal, and yeah it’s aggravating but what to do? No point ruining your name or someone else’s but you have the right to your opinion about this practice. Naturally, you do what you know best; you blog.

This is really happening to friends of mine. My blog hasn’t been added to the site. I am an interested party though, and wanted to share what my fellow bloggers had to say.

I encourage you to visit the blogs. Read them through, and consider what’s said. Agree or disagree, that’s your right, but please take an interest. It could be your blog next.

News Bitch

Little Bald Doctors

WOBL in Training

Superfunpatrol

The State of Discontent

Mamalogues

Slacker Moms-R-Us

MidwestBlogs -St Louis

Prologos

Highway 61

A Bun’s Life

Courtney Watson

The Art of Self Destruction

I’ll post more as I gather them. Stay tuned.

If reading about all this isn’t your thing, then might I suggest kittens.