Aggregation: To Link or Summarize

At a glance
This entry was written on July 9, 2008.
The entry prior to this is entitled Not hyperlocal ... Hyper-Me.
The entry following this is entitled Start spreading the news (photos).
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So, as I mentioned in the last post, we’re working on a massive content aggregation project right now, with the plan to allow folks to include sources from all over the internet (essentially, anything that has an RSS feed).

So, the question becomes: Do we link directly to the referenced post? Or do we include the RSS summary with a “Read More” link?

Personally, I like the later, and it makes sense from a user perspective since they’re not jumping around all over the place and a business perspective.

The original plan is to do summaries and “Read More” links, for a number of reasons:

  1. It’s a more-friendly user experience (in my mind).

  2. It allows you to maintain a local conversation about non-local content.

  3. Well, there is the whole ad impressions thing …

  4. We can more easily do things with it, such as mixing it into group content, favoriting, linking, tagging, etc.

But, I care about being a good internet citizen as well … so, I’m wondering if anyone has any strong feelings about this sort of topic.

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