A friend of mine just posted about a new service called Scribit. After viewing the video, it seems to take posts from some big websites and allow them to repost them on your site and across social channels, keeping traffic directed at your site, not the content creator’s site. So it is essentially a very lazy person’s Google reader and scraping service, from what I can tell.
If it has licensing deals with certain blogs, I get the revenue stream model, sure. I worry about what this does to people actually discovering good content on their own and authentically sharing it, rather than on remote control.
But I think the thing that offends me most, however is the “Content creation is hard” premise. It reminds me of when Mattel got an earful after producing a talking Barbie that said “Math is hard!” Well, duh. Some things in life are supposed to be hard. Being in business. Building a community. Being original. Being authentic. But when you are original, then you gain a reputation- I’m not sure you deserve a better reputation for merely being a “Me Too! sort of person.
I get that not everyone is a copy writer, but it’s worth the results to get better at it over time. It’s a skill worth developing, and the web has been great for giving people a voice and to allow then to self-publish. Bulk aggregation and scraping seems to me to be besides the pont in having social channels and blogs in the first place, and this seems to be another SEO/SEM hijacking kind of thing, but I may be wrong.
What do you think? Is mass aggregation and redirecting to your site instead of the authors okay? Why or why not? Why shouldn’t you have to create your own content? Is this worth $50 or more a month to you?
Inquiring minds want to know.