Aug 11th On Republishing Comments

Given the recent uproar against Fav.or.it republishing both stories and comments on their service alongside advertisements, we thought it would be a good idea to explain what we’re doing and how it’s different.

Motivation
Our service was created mainly to attribute comments to their authors: to remix comments, not replay them. Comments on BackType are shown in an entirely different context - by topic and by author. We’re trying to boost the incentive to write (good) comments so individuals and businesses can contribute to their reputation and brand, respectively. It’s our belief that conversations should not be fragmented; they should be complements to the original thought or post where they can inspire further dialog - to reward the content creator.

In summary:

  1. We don’t (re)publish posts - we link to them
  2. We don’t attempt to relocate or divert the conversation
  3. We always link back to the comment; in fact, we encourage it so the reader is able to digest the comment in its original context and join the conversation

We are constantly looking for ways to help bloggers and content creators. Feel free to contact us: give us feedback and suggest ways in which we can help build your community and drive traffic to your property.

6 Responses to “On Republishing Comments”

tfl says:

One question regarding your summary: do you (now or in the future) re-publish comments with advertising. That is, is your business model built on monetising comments?

I think (and hope) the answer is NO, but it would be useful to formally declare your position. I was one who did not like th idea tha some sites will reuse blog posts and comments for ad income generation (especially when that income is not shared with the orignal writer).

Mathew says:

Publishing comments from other peoples blogs is defiantly not ethical, I contacted the author of one of the blogs who's comments are listed here and he certainly didn't know and didn't want his comments appearing on this site, to me this should be opt in by blog owners only.

golda says:

The blog author you contacted can prevent BackType from indexing his comments. Here's how:
http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14

Similar to other search engines, like Google and Yahoo, BackType honors the robots exclusion protocol.

Tom says:

How do I block you from stealing my content?

I think there still a lot of misunderstood of backtype purpose, isn't it? This issue must be solve soon.

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