February 13th, 2009 
joel Editors Note: Danny Lucas is a extensive consumer of the new media, and a prolific commenter on blogs around Erie and beyond. Today in a guest post here on The Press and Tower, Danny sounds a warning call about the vulnerabilities in the wild, wild west world of the web. It’s best we listen.
Let’s pretend you write a blog. You enjoy the topic, post, and soon draw comments. To disperse online and draw a wider audience, you employ newer technology and actually release your blog via an RSS Feed.
Locally, Erie Blogs and Erie PA Today both provide an aggregator service to disperse your Erie blog to a wider audience faster. This is a plus for the blogger and the community at large.
But in the healthcare industry, a new trend has set in that calls into question online ethics. A group contacted health care writers and offered them an award as the best writer on a given topic in health care. It could be a doctor, a patient, a company such as pharmacy, whatever.
Within the fine print of the award, a tiny blurb announced that the aggregator of blogs OWNS the posts and comments and you release them to do what they choose with it. This is different from “linking” to your site as a blog originator retaining control of material.
The blog Sunshine and Moonlight is about multiple sclerosis, from the point of view of a patient. This is one of 1,700 blogs in the health industry to be awarded a “Wellsphere“ endorsement…..recognition…….lair.
A commenter at Sunshine and Moonlight alerted the blog owner, to the practices of an online aggregator of blogs. It seems the aggregation and compiling allows exclusive rights to content (under the unrealized Terms of Service). The comment of warning is here: http://sunshineandmoonlight.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/more-exciting-news-about-adult-stem-cells-and-ms/#comment-3066
1,700 bloggers have been duped by accepting an award that says they are good writers in the healthfield. Companies, doctors, patients, all are snared. Wellsphere, the protagonist, is claiming ownership of the RSS Feeds from bloggers to Wellsphere. In turn, Wellsphere is SELLING the info for big bucks: http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/01/28/healthcentral-buys-wellsphere-as-online-health-shakeout-continues/ (read some of the first comments on this post link too).
Since this information is current as of Feb. 5, 2009 the FASTEST form of information travel has gone to bat to alert everyone that Wellshere is making money on your writings.
That informer is called Twitter. The Tweets of shock and anger are here:
http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1180454469&page=1&q=%23wellsphere
Book authors widely use testimonials and endorsements on the jacket back or inside cover. Fine. It is expected to be positive. The reader knows this going into the venture of buying or skipping the book. But the Code of Ethics you can site for doctors, is desperately needed online now. Wellsphere is making the case for that need!
This blog, The Press and Tower, is primarily focused on TV, Radio, and what is left of Newspapers. Affecting all three of those is New Media.
New Media has plusses and minuses, but continues to devour the landscape in what used to be known as journalism, lately entertainment.
I have looked for blog and news aggregators.
Drudge has made his fame claim by doing just that. The Daily Beast tries to distill the best of that days news/blogs, etc. But the longer I read The Daily Beast, the more I see it as the National Enquirer of Online. The woman selling her virginity for nearly $4 million has been there for 3 weeks now. It is old news and trivial to begin with. The government will not stop the sale as she is in Nevada, where prostitution is legal. So The Daily Beast does aggregate, but not Daily, and the stories are Beastly, not Best.
But a new vein of thought opens with the selling for profit as an aggregator, of what they did not write…….while all the authors get zip for their work. This is like writing for a newspaper and coming up with the story of the century. Who owns it? You, or your employer called the newspaper?
The subject is carrying over into New Media.
There is a countervailing purpose going on. The bloggers need exposure to the global audience. The aggregator (especially a topic oriented aggregator) facillitates exposure. Whether the topic is health care, or Erie, PA, an aggregation helps readers find what they want on the Internet without wading through 10,000,000 hits in 0.7 seconds at Google.
But what if the entire collection is later sold? WHO deserves the revenue from the sale and from resulting advertisements as a result of a larger audience? Who has the rights to the blog posts and the comments within? How much are they worth?
~~~ Danny Lucas
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wow..nice to know that
It is 8:25 am, on Monday, February 16, 2009.
But you may recall January 21, 1970 at 5:09 am.
Well, at least if you are this old:
39 Years, 1 Month, 3 Weeks, 5 Days, 3 Hours, 16 Minutes ago
I remember the day well. I was in Santa Barbara, California, traveling up the coast, then scooting over Canada, with a whopper tour of Manitoba by May.
Kent State student fiasco had yet to occur. That would be May 4th coming up yet.
There were no computer programs in school.
If you chose to study computers as a techie, you used Punch cards and punched holes in a stack maybe 20 inches high, fed them into a machine which read the holes, and spit out a program on chattering dot matrix printers……you remember, a box of paper with holes on both sides, oversized, continuously streaming into the feeder to print the program you need, from the stack of punch cards you made.
With the printout, you now had the abilty to Command a computer to “read the 2 inches of paper from the 20 inches of cards, and create an inch on a page called data. Voila! It would be about as much as I have typed here so far.
Bill Gates had yet to NOT graduate from his garage, or even have a decent date yet. He was 14 years old.
But like the movie Back To The Future, Erie Blogs Blog Browser records all blogs posted back to when Bill Gates was 14, and not a single blog had yet to enter Earth. Local talents cover it all, eh?
In my post here above, I noted two local Erie based aggregators of blogs. Erie Pa Today is much younger than Erie Blogs.
Today, February 16, 2009, Erie Blogs converted their scroll of current blogs to imitate the wildly successful format of Blog Scroll at Erie PA Today (although EB STILL has the font wrong—too small guys….scoot to EPT and see the proper sizing of letters). (and they employ pictures with the scroll at Erie PA Today).
Erie PA Today announced recently, they would be not updating news/sarcasm/opinion section, for health reasons.
But the scroll worked flawlessly with no one attending it. In fact, it daily produces a series of Blogs about 40% MORE than Erie Blogs. (rough guess, may be too low)
And, Erie Pa Today is not just ahead in QUANTITY of Blogs scrolled for you, they come out as the Blogger releases them (they are generally prereleased and timed to go public).
If you go to Erie PA Today, the Press and Tower, with this post title named, is STILL in appearance more than 3 days after it entered online.
If you go to Erie Blogs, Press and Tower is listed waaaay to the right in the alphabetical series. You would think their blog posts are carried on the scroll.
Not true.
This post NEVER appeared on the scroll bar at Erie Blogs in 3 days, yet STILL appears on the scroll bar at Erie PA Today.
So, Erie PA Today offers a far wider selection of blogs to read, updates them immediately, and maintains them for you to read at your leisure, or return and see newer comments on a post. If you are a blogger and want to build an audience, MAKE SURE you are on Erie PA Today.
Whether you are on another aggregator really won’t matter then.
“BUT”, would proclaim EB, “we have an extensive list on our mega Blog Browser of everthing from the past”.
I looked at that blog browser today and Press and Tower is not the only one missing posts being published by EB aggregator. This post from P&T does not exist on the Mega Browser either.
Walk into Blasco Library and use the Dewey Decimal System to find a book. Go to the aisle and pick it up. Done.
But what if you walked into Blasco and they recorded their entire library by chapters in a book, then, mixed the chapters up with all the books. Could you find YOUR book? Good luck.
That is how the Erie Blogs Blog Browser is set up.
A Blogger’s POST is on top in good font, and the BLOG is below in tiny font. Erie Blogs lists the “chapters”, and it is your job to wade through it all to find your book (Blog of choice). It is meaningless.
Joel titled this post: ” Lucas: Who Owns Your Post?”.
The Erie Blogs does not carry it by post title or by blog title. It never scrolled for viewers to know it exists. It is NOT even on the hideous Blog Browser with every Blog Post in all of history, supposedly listed.
How do I know?
Bill Gates was 14 years old fighting zits.
There was no computer.
Kent State had yet to occur.
Punch cards would be developed soon, to create computer programs to make a computer read out memory.
But Erie Blog Browser wants you to believe they were reording Blogs THEN!
39 Years, 1 Month, 3 Weeks, 5 Days, 3 Hours, 16 Minutes ago
That line is a cut and paste from here:
http://www.erieblogs.com/blogbrowser/page/360
Erie Blogs has the uncanny ability to NOT record the Present, but record December 31, 1969…..when Bill Gates was 14 years old and computers nor blogs were around, or cell phones and Twitter.
Are there any ethical differences between the two Erie based Blog aggregators?
Note that neither has expressed a comment on whether THEY do or do not employ ownership of YOUR blog content, as outlined in this blog post at Press and Tower.
Joel puts his Feedjit system to your right. It records all traffic in and out of this site. It is in plain view for you to know you are being recorded to the second on when you came, where you went, and when you left. But, you are easily able to see that this is being done.
You do NOT see a Feedjit posted at Erie Blogs or Erie PA Today. Since you are being recorded by your viewing habits, do you think it should be front page information, as Joel has done, or hidden information, you are not allowed to know?
Every ethical blogger I have viewed online with Feedjit, puts it out for you to see you are being recorded.
I already KNOW about whether our local aggregators employ this. You do NOT know, for you cannot see it.
If you post under an anonymous or pseudo name, do you think that should be protected information?
Would Topix fight in court to protect your anon status (or pseudo anon)?
Would EB or EPT do the same to protect your invisibility as well as the Feedjit is hidden?
Or would either actually disclose your aliases every single day?
Decide for yourself which aggregator best represents information, and which best represents disinformation.
Do you think blogs/and or/aggregators should NOTIFY you of this behind the scenes behavior and information?
Online ethics…..to be continued.
I’ve recently “disconnected” from Wellsphere due to their ever-developing issues via their terms of service and have began alerting other health bloggers of the problems associated with Wellsphere. Reminds me a little of Facebook’s drama merely a week ago.