Mott the Hoople and a Lesson in Blogonomics

Fred Wilson uses his brother's post on Mott the Hoople to drive a lesson home about the dis-economics of blogging caused by Aggregators like Friendfeed etc. (if ya don't know Mott, ya don't know squit about music, so go Google 'em before continuing).

Sez Fred:

My brother, known as Jackson to the blog world, wrote a wonderful post on the rock band Mott The Hoople last week. I saw it today and posted it to delicious. Which resulted in it showing up in my FriendFeed.

And the good news is that a bunch of people saw that post that would have never seen it otherwise. A few went to Blogger and left a comment for Jackson. And a bunch left comments on FriendFeed that Jackson will never see and never reply to. And he also won't see Robert's compliment which I know he'd appreciate.

So here's the deal. Jackson instigated the conversation with that post. His reward is the comments it generates. That's how bloggers get paid. And he's not getting his due on this one.

It's sort of my fault because I posted it to delicious and got the conversation going elsewhere. It's also sort of the fault of the people who left comments on FriendFeed and not Jackson's blog.

Fred then calls for something we have argued for since aggregation became fashionable, ie reverse aggregation:

So it's time for aggregation to work two-way. You can suck it out. But you have to pump it back too.

Indeed - a parasite ecosystem is supposed to keep its host alive, not kill the thing it loves most. Just putting wires into blogs to suck stuff out of them reduces the incentives of bloggers to bother. And here's the thing - the aggregation phase comes AFTER the content creation phase in the supply chain.

But it's not beyond the wit of man to build reverse aggregation either - all it requires is for aggregators to keep the source metadata, pump comments into a common format that blogs can then suck back in, and open sesame. (OK, its non trivial to code, but its not that hard).

Another thought I had was a change to my CC conditions to a more GNU like approach - you are welcome to comment on my stuff, but a comment is like a code change, so you have to return a copy of the comment to me.

Problem is that doing this destroys the value proposition of the aggregators short term - long term they die of course, but no doubt they are hoping some dumb mone...some strategic investor will buy the service complete with the extracted intrinsic social media content within.

But kill the will to produce content, and why would anyone play the game anymore - which leaves nothing to aggregate and comment on, right?

Or, as Mott the Hoople may have put it:

They gambled, with my life
and now I've lost my will to fight
Oh God these wires are so tight....
I'm just a marionette.

So who shall dis-aggregate the aggregators?

(PS blogs are also well mannered enough to link to source content)

Update - as expected, a number of people take issue with Fred, the two main counters seem to be that (i) the off-blog conversation drives extra traffic and (ii) this is inevitable, live with it. Stowe Boyd leads this view with:

Fred and others in the comment discussion touch on many perspectives, but I think they share a naivete about the difference between the concept of a flat and unitary web and the realities of a discontinuous and partially closed web. The small worlds is like human scale, while the flat and unitary model is the sort of web that traditional media people would want.

Well yes, but the point I was making (in my naivete ), is that any system that relies on its existence on another, but does not help it, is creating lousy game theory for any form of co-operation. Hence I don't think the Aggregators are sustainable, whereas Blogs are