BNN’s first entry into Missouri was their political blog aggregator. They scrape up a series of blogs and post them for all to see, in the hopes of driving advertising dollars.

The St Louis aggregator is a second strategy, focusing more on personal blogs.

My take on it is that it’s good for BNN, but not entirely useful. If you go through the blogs, you’re not getting the Best Of, or even a representative sample. In fact, it seems like mostly they just went through the stlbloggers blogroll and added everyone they could find.

As I said, good for BNN, but not entirely useful. There are 12 million some blogs in the US, or there was the last time I saw numbers - not all of them need to be read. The problem with aggregators that solely use technology is they become targets for spam and traditional internet ad tactics.

The initial rush of, hey, someone linked me is followed by lots of people writing about BlogNetNews, but primarily it’s smaller bloggers who will jump on board.

St Louis has a large group of well known bloggers that aren’t connected through St Louis, but instead connect to larger networks in their industries. BNN doesn’t have any of them, and since it’s just a template repeated in each city, it doesn’t make sense to put time and effort into it.

Cheap aggregation was cool when we did it in 2003, 2004 - now it would be smarter to build a good looking local site and make it more exclusive - kind of like what the newspaper does with regular news, but doing it with blogs.

Good points, Jim. I’d love to hear you to talk more about what that “exclusive site” looks like. As I look at BNN’s tools, it seems to give the Knoxville News an easy means to do some of that — to parse blogs by topic, to add or subtract blogs as needed (Knoxville’s editor can add or subtract blogs and bloggers can have their blogs added as well). I don’t disagree that the idea of pure aggregation is “so two years ago,” but I’m compelled by some of the tools that could make the process easier, as I understand your final sentence.

Thanks for commenting.

I’ll write some of these up and give you a call, Kurt.

A blog aggregator can be good idea, but it’s better to do it yourself (I could build a manual one in a few days - I’m sure your developers could do a better job without needing BNN), and then you own the platform.

What’s key is who owns the property. If you own it, you get all the ad revenue. That’s what BNN is doing. It’s taking content and advertising away from other bloggers and newspapers, who foolishly give up their content so that BNN can profit.

Since it’s scraped, BNN is making money off of what other people do, which is a form of splogging, but with a slightly more professional look and feel. It’s a narrow line to walk - and I’m not saying what they are doing is wrong - but it can quickly tip over into that area.

Agreed, that a developer could do it. It’s a question of priorities.

So you understand, I’m not cheerleading for BNN. I see some value there. I also agree there’s a fine line. I wonder, for example, if Google Reader crosses that line with tools that allow me to read all my blogs without ever leaving their site!

Jim,

I really appreciate criticism of BNN, because more often than not it makes a path to improving the site obvious. You can pay a lot for that kind of help and critics give it away for free. Usually, emotions aside, there’s no reason to be anything but grateful.

There’s not much I can use in what you’ve said though, because you’ve made a bunch of assumptions and statements of facts about BNN that are simply wrong. No doubt plenty of that is my fault because I am seriously behind in the documentation of the BNN site, but since your comments are on such a prominent St. Louis site, I feel the need to revise and expand on what you’ve said.

“BNN’s first entry into Missouri was their political blog aggregator. They scrape up a series of blogs and post them for all to see…” — We didn’t “scrape up a series of blogs” — I spent days in the Missouri blogosphere, searching for blogs across the political spectrum that consistently wrote about state and local public affairs. I then reached out to those bloggers whose emails I could find and asked for help in making sure I hadn’t missed other important sites. Since then, I’ve added more sites who fit the bill when their owners emailed me or when I have come back and revisited Missouri blogs.

We don’t “post them for all to see” either, we post short excerpts of each blog post and then link back to the originating blog twice from each post (the headline and the “…” thingy). The only way to read the full post is to click through to the originating blog.

The next thing you say is this: “If you go through the blogs, you’re not getting the Best Of, or even a representative sample. In fact, it seems like mostly they just went through the stlbloggers blogroll and added everyone they could find.” — This assumes that the site is a finished product. Since we first launched the site, I’ve added dozens of blogs and we’ll keep adding them as we add them. Eventually our hope is to have the most comprehensive and up to date set of St. Louis area bloggers that you can find anywhere. That just doesn’t happen. It will take diving back into the St. Louis blogosphere over and over.

continued …

“The problem with aggregators that solely use technology is they become targets for spam and traditional internet ad tactics.” — That’s entirely true, but the essence of BNN is that it is human driven aggregation — no blog ever gets into BNN without a human editor reading it latest posts and archives.

“It’s taking content and advertising away from other bloggers and newspapers, who foolishly give up their content so that BNN can profit.” — This is like arguing that Google and Yahoo and Digg and a million other sites that involve aggregation are taking content and advertising away from bloggers and newspapers. The argument still gets made, but among serious people, the debate is over. Let me repeat myself, as a writer myself, I built BNN so that blog writers would benefit from their work, because nobody can read it on BNN, they can only find it and follow the link.

There’s much in the rest of what you said Jim that I disagree with, but you are welcome to your opinion and it is certainly a point of view that is found all over the place. I just wanted to hit the most important things that I think are more factual than opinion-based. If some of what I wrote comes across more hot than I intended, I hope you’ll appreciate that I don’t mean it that way.

David,

No offense taken - you’re defending your product, and that gets people pretty riled up. I’d be happy to carry this conversation further off-line, and I’m sorry you can’t use what I told you to strengthen your offerings. The advice was intended for Kurt and the Post-Dispatch, but let me clarify my concerns.

As a blog aggregator, you take content from other people and post it on your site. Your goal would be to have people start with BNN, and then go to other people sites. This is to drive advertising dollars to you. As a strategy, it’s a good one for you, but it’s rarely beneficial to bloggers.

I have nothing against you setting up the site. For some people, it will be eye-opening that there are other blogs out there. At the same time, established bloggers and business bloggers are better off working to build up their own networks. Take the political blogs for an example. You created a list of political blogs, but have you helped to build community among those bloggers? How does your service help the people who do the writing? Compare what that site does with what the KC Prime Buzz aggregator does. That’s a real person you can contact, and the stories are based on what they find of interest. That editorial control exercised on each story, not each blog, makes the difference.

In addition, I don’t remember authorizing you to take my content and put it on your blog aggregator. In taking that content, you’re forcing me to contact you to delete it. So you’re opt-out, rather than opt-in. That offends me as a publisher of content.

In broader terms, why should bloggers avoid blog aggregators? Control. If readers use your site instead of RSS feeds, they lose subscribers. If bloggers drive people to your site by announcing that they are part of BNN, and you later on decide to delete them, they’ve lost out. The traffic you’re giving in clicks is the main reason to participate, but the bigger and more influential you get, the more likely bloggers are to lose traffic from search engine referrals. Every time I link to you, I’m driving future traffic away from my site and on to yours through the magic of SEO. As for ads - readers who click on your ads are not clicking on the ads of the bloggers themselves. This is very different from Google or Yahoo, who are the source of the ads. Digg requires submissions, so it’s user-based. You aggregate everything, regardless of the quality of the individual post. You’re closer to an online version of bloglines with a hint of a web directory added.

It’s a clever strategy, and I’m glad to see you using human aggregation, but the fact remains that you are building an advertising network that is separate from local networks. You derive value, and profit from that aggregation, without a corresponding reward for the bloggers. At the same time, newspapers who utilize your services are buying into the idea of aggregating without playing to their strengths, which is editorial control and advertising. Perhaps you’re working with newspapers in other cities and have solved that problem. I don’t see it in your Missouri feeds.

Some people will use BNN and be happy to do so. Good for them. As an expert in this field, my advice to the newspapers is to do it themselves, and make it better.

Jim,

It is comments like this:

“You created a list of political blogs, but have you helped to build community among those bloggers? How does your service help the people who do the writing?”

… that make me think that you haven’t spent much time looking at BlogNetNews.com before launching your negative review.

I am going to give examples thru links to our Virginia political blog aggregator because that is the one that has been around the longest, but the majority of the features on our site are built with the purpose of helping bloggers build community and make it easier and more efficient for those who do the writing. Our goal is also to make it easier for blog readers to find the posts that think will be most interesting.

For instance,

We let bloggers and readers quickly get a sense of which blog posts in a community are getting the most new comments: http://www.blognetnews.com/virginia/?order=c

What are the latest blog posts from the blogs that are getting the most new links from other bloggers in the community: http://www.blognetnews.com/virginia/?order=l

What are the blog posts that are attracting BNN readers to click through and read the whole thing. http://www.blognetnews.com/virginia/most-clicked_archive.php

That’s just a sample of the data we collect that is a single click away from each city/state/topic’s front page. Some people will find it useful, some not, but all of it is valuable to some users who’d have a hard time gathering it anywhere else.

We also build a targeted search engine so that bloggers who want to know who else in their community has talked about similar topics can quickly find it without dealing with all the extraneous stuff you get in a Google or Technorati blog search. Again, it is not something everybody will find useful, but some in the community find it worth the time.

We build bloggers a widget that lets bloggers have a constantly updated feed of the latest blog headlines in their community on their site. The links go directly from the blog that hosts the widget to the blog with the new post, cutting BNN out of the middle. Here’s Virginia’s http://www.blognetnews.com/virginia/add-bnn.php . I know people find it useful because it has been added to hundreds of state and city-level blogs since we introduced. In January, it was loaded five million times.

Another feature we just launched in December is Feed Central you can check it out here: http://www.blognetnews.com/feedcentral/

The idea is to let BNN users create a custom feed from a state or a city that meets their interests and then have it delivered how they want, with traditional RSS, formatted for mobile, in an hourly email, a daily summary email or in a widget. All the methods of having the feeds delivered are set to encourage readers to click through to the originating blog.

The theory is pretty simple — when our efforts make blogs more useful and more accessible for more people — blogs have the opportunity to attract more readers.

continued in a minute

Another example of how BNN’s state-wide public affairs blog aggregators have improved the blog community comes from the inspiration of BNN.

Years ago, a web innovator from the Pacific Northwest launched a site called leftyblogs.com that brought together the best of the left-leaning public affairs blogosphere in all 50 states. It was a great leap forward (no pun intended) in building blog community and helping a political community promote its members, but it also fell flat in the sense of really fostering debate and conversation across a wider spectrum.

I come from a newspaper editorial page background and something I believe passionately is that the friction of opposing views is the way forward to consensus and making our cities, states and country a better place. If you use compete or alexa or quantcast to get a very rough estimate of BNN’s readership compared to leftyblogs, it is pretty clear to me that readers are voting with their mice.

That’s one niche I want BNN to fill and

This conversation has moved on to other sites, and it now seems clear that my advice to Dave Mastio proved prophetic.

In just a week and a half, hundreds of comments have been left on the sites of some of the most prominent social bloggers in St Louis, with over 90% of the comments being unfavorable to Blog Net News. Rather than work with bloggers, Dave has chosen a baffling strategy of confronting the bloggers and in many cases accusing them of being the bad guys.

Sadly, Dave feels he is the victim, but when you scrape content from other sites without asking for their permission, and then try to sell that to advertisers, you deserve what’s coming.

The top four search result pages for “Dave Mastio” on Google are now riddled with anti-BlogNetNews comments. A group of St Louis bloggers are posting negative reviews of the site and encouraging others to have their voices heard.

It didn’t have to be this way - but if you poke a hornet’s nest, you don’t get to complain if you get stung.

If you are a company reading this - don’t be scared off by bloggers. Do take the time to understand how to approach bloggers and if you want to avoid bad publicity, don’t insult the people you are trying to reach.

For a four part series on what Dave did wrong, head on over to State of Discontent