So this weekend has seen the same story boil over ‘again’. But this time the ‘bitchmeme’ is aimed at Shyftr. Why? Because similar to fav.or.it when reading posts you are allowed to comment against the post, BUT – and a BIG BUT unlike fav.or.it those comments stay within Shyftr. So quite a few bloggers are up in arms that they are losing comments + traffic because those readers are staying within Shyftr.

I have been blogging over on my personal blog for nearly a year and although I agree that I initially became a serious stats whore, I soon realised the most precious thing to me on my blog, was 1) the readers 2) the contribution they made via comments. If those comments are taking place somewhere else, is it fair that I have to follow them around just because another service (they appear every week it seems at the moment) has found another way to leverage that conversation away from my content!!

And this is why when I started building fav.or.it my number 1 mission was that as a blogger I still got that the attention I wanted, in fact (and what we are already seeing) that fav.or.it increases the volume of comments and interaction.

Scoble believes that bloggers control is over and he has previously stated (multiple times) that he is willing just to follow whatever trend to keep track of the conversation, well we do not all have the time or inclination to follow the latest trend in the techosphere. I have nothing against friendfeed/others (as I am one of those tech-whores that consumes every new bell+whistle service) but we are a tiny niche and the rest of the blogosphere will suffer because of our obsessions.

Creative Commons

We also believed from day one that the blogger / content owner must always be in control, so we wanted to build in creative commons support – this is actually currently active but within our reader it does not ‘currently’ display the license type for each post/feed, but when we launch our portal in a few weeks time (or less) the creative commons will be of utmost importance, why? because we will be producing a portal of republished content – and we will ONLY do this within the constraints of the licenses of that content.

Shyftr

So lastly, the guys from Shyftr if you want to make sure the conversation takes place back at the blog – come talk to us about using our API, I can always be found on twitter.

UPDATE: As noted by Louis Gray Shyftr have made changes that basically means any posts that have comments against them will only be shown as a excerpt. I think this is a backward step for them myself but it seems to have called off the wolves for the moment.