Aggregation News & Articles

When we last debated content v. context, the word curation came up. For some it was an inaccurate term, best reserved for art historians and museum directors than online web strategists. Yet, it’s not surprising that many content curators can be found among the news industry.

Shiftyr, which stands for ‘Share Your Feeds Together” is a service that attempts to mix a feed reader and a social networking site all in one place, where you can share your feeds with your friends and find similar feeds. This all sounds great, except for one crucial error: they started re-publishing the feeds of sites without the publishers’ permission. This allowed search engines to index the feeds — similar to what “splogs” do — and essentially take traffic away from the original site and diverting it to Shiftyr.

Bloggers were not very pleased.