

Introducing BackType Alerts - omakase
http://blog.backtype.com/2008/09/introducing-backtype-alerts/

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LukeG
Nicely done...I still prefer my RSS tracking to Google Alerts, but this is
definitely going in the arsenal.

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rantfoil
Another essential tool in the arsenal of a startup founder... monitoring and
responding directly to feedback is critical.

~~~
omakase
I think a lot of people forget the responding part. Sometimes it's hard to
know when to respond and when to let things go -- but it's amazing how quickly
a pissed off user turns into a loyal one if you take the time to communicate
with them.

~~~
Mrinal
I so agree to that - we respond to the smallest of small bloggers for a good
or bad post. No discrimination! Experiencing Backtype with this too.....

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ig1
It's pretty confusing, it looks like a service I might use so I went to the
home page and set up an alert for "fizzbuzz", I then got a prompt asking my to
register (do I have to register for the alert to work ? is it optional ?).
After registering I ended up at a page which confused the hell out of me.

"we haven't found any of your comments yet" left me thinking - have they not
found any comments that match my search term or does it mean something else.

The options given were: # Claim Comments – help us find your comments # Edit
Account – review your account details # Edit Profile – so people can find you
# Search – for people to follow

The "Search" option kinda sounds like what I want to do, but the "for people
to follow" makes me think it isn't. It's completely unclear what I need to do
in order to track some keywords.

~~~
konsl
Sorry -- Alerts require you to be a registered user so we can deliver them to
a verified e-mail address. If you don't want to sign-up, you can perform
searches and subscribe to results via RSS.

We thought it would be cool if we carried an alert through the sign-up process
and added it afterwards. I guess we didn't realize how confusing it would be
when the registration was complete. We'll be making this a lot more clear;
thanks for the feedback.

The page you're viewing (the Dashboard) allows you to:

\- View comments by people you're following (/home)

\- View alerts you've subscribed to (/home/alerts)

\- View comments shared by people you're following (/home/shared)

We're going to revisit that welcome msg; for now, you should visit
<http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts> to find your alert and subscribe to
more. Alternatively, you can perform searches on
<http://www.backtype.com/comments> and subscribe to them from the results
page.

Thanks again.

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anotherjesse
The twitter integration doesn't seem to work.

I was talking to a friend about creating a "daily tweet" a daily summary of
tweets of a search term. If they get this working then I don't have to build
it.

~~~
konsl
We haven't done any Twitter integration yet. We are going to add a button to
tweet a comment, but we aren't doing digests. If you want to push a digest to
twitter, you can link your comments feed from BackType to:
<http://twitterfeed.com/>

We'll be releasing an API soon so that the apps/tools/etc we don't build can
still be built.

~~~
anotherjesse
Ahh, I read too quickly:

"Following comments by a particular author a la Twitter was a core feature
when we launched"

I thought you guys used search.twitter.com and included tweets with my alert
term. Please do add twitter as a source of comments for the alerts :)

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fallentimes
I'm already a google alerts fiend, so I've been looking forward to these for a
while.

Great work guys.

~~~
dmix
I had some Google alerts set up to keep track of an industry I am entering but
they cluttered up my RSS reader and became a chore. I'm thinking about using
something like Rivalmap instead.

Backtype alerts would be good for comments which is almost as important as
blog posts.

~~~
fallentimes
I don't use RSS...I just have Google Alerts email me a summary depending on
the importance (i.e. as it happens for important stuff, daily/weekly for not
so important stuff).

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sanj
what is really unfortunate here is that by being obstinate and combative with
briansmith and plagiarismtoday, konsi is missing a solid business opportunity
here.

As far as I can tell the mechanism to identify users is based on name and URL
which is probably the best you can do. What this does create is a centralized
ID for blog commentators.

By registring as a blog _commentator_ with backtype, commentators could have a
mechanism to control the distribution of their comments: control over
copyright issues like the size of their excerpt or the ability to opt out.

At the same time, backtype ends up as the repository of record for comments
and has an alias database of commentators, which I can anticipate being
monetizable.

Every opportunity starts out looking like a snake.

~~~
jamesbritt
" By registring as a blog commentator with backtype, commentators could have a
mechanism to control the distribution of their comments: control over
copyright issues like the size of their excerpt or the ability to opt out.

At the same time, backtype ends up as the repository of record for comments
and has an alias database of commentators, which I can anticipate being
monetizable."

So the burden of opt-out falls on the those writing comments, while backtype
gets the monetizable data so provided?

No thanks.

What could be interesting is if bloggers arranged their software so that every
posted comment included a copyright notice declaring that the comment was
copyrighted by the commenter and that it may not be reproduced in full, only
excerpted (for example).

I would hate, though, for people to start thinking that, absent such explicit
claim on content , it's fair game for poaching.

~~~
sanj
microformats to the rescue!

Or perhaps a commentator.txt file on ID urls.

My larger point is that this is an _opportunity_.

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prakash
how is this different from google alerts?

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fallentimes
Google alerts doesn't pick up comments. At least it never does for me.

~~~
omakase
Exactly! We will be publishing a blog post soon that shows the difference
between BackType search results and other services.

I think businesses should be using every tool that is available to them to
track their brand. That includes BackType Alerts, Google Alerts,
Twitter/Summize search, Technorati search, FriendFeed search, etc.

~~~
briansmith
What is your position on the copyright of comments? I've tried to contact your
company to get you to stop re-publishing my comments on your website and you
didn't even respond to my message. What can copyright holders do to ensure
that you do not re-publish their content?

~~~
konsl
Hi Brian,

We try to respond to every single e-mail we get; not sure how yours was
missed. I apologize.

We've talked about our policy on re-publishing comments in a few places:

\- [http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-
withb...](http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-withbacktype-
co-founder-chris-golda/#more-3814)

\- <http://blog.backtype.com/2008/08/on-republishing-comments/>

\- etc

In summary: what BackType is doing is very similar to other search engines. We
make every effort to provide content publishers with familiar methods to
restrict BackType from indexing their site's content:
<http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14>

We're trying to be as transparent as possible. We attribute comments to their
authors so they can be rewarded for the thoughts and insights they share in
comments across the web. Additionally, BackType is already becoming a
recognized source of traffic for publishers and we want that to continue.

~~~
briansmith
Please see the post on Plagiarism Today that was linked to from one of the
pages you mentioned above:
[http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-
republish...](http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republishing-
comments/)

When I comment on TechCrunch or 37signals, I don't give them the copyright to
my comment. I (implicitly) give them a license to republish the comment on
their own website. However, I've never given Backtype a license to republish
my comments on its website. Even if TechCrunch or 37signals chooses not to opt
out of your system, you still don't have any legal rights to republish the
comments.

From the commenter's standpoint, does it make sense to let you republish my
content? I think the answer is emphatically "no." If I republish my own
comments myself then I can also monetize them myself. If I build a WordPress
plug-in to assist others in doing this, and/or if I build an OpenID extension
or robots.txt extension for making comment streams more discoverable, then I
can help form a user expectation of "If I want to see all the comments by John
Doe, I can find them on John Doe's website." Then all the John Does can decide
on their own how they monetize their own content on their own website (e.g.
AdSense).

Consequently, really you are in direct competition with the people whose
content you are re-publishing. AFAICT, you are saying "we're going to profit
from your content without compensating you, regardless of the copyright, and
there's no way that you can opt out except by refusing to publish new
content." That sucks.

In the posts you linked to, you are comparing yourself to search engines like
Google. The difference between your company and Google is that your company
republishes the content in full, but Google provides just a small clip of the
content. Google has a fair claim that what they are doing is fair use. Their
limited excerpting of content is also what allows them to use an opt-out model
instead of an opt-in model. That is also what makes it is easy for content
creators to profit from Google's indexing of their content--Google users have
to click through to the original site to see the content. You are just re-
publishing the content in aggregate form.

I'm also curious about whether you think the DCMA safe harbor provisions apply
to you when you are republishing others' content. As far as I can tell, they
cannot, since you've really just built an automated plagiarism system. That
is, there is no user-submitted content on your site; all the content published
on your site is published by you yourself.

Anyway, if you really didn't get the message I sent your company, it boils
down to this: Please remove everything I've written from your website, or come
up with a means of fairly compensating me. Thank you.

~~~
cwp
It seems to me that from a narrow legal stand point, you have a decent
argument. From a more practical stand point, if you wish to monetize what you
write, I'd suggest that posting it as comments isn't a good way to go about
it. Why not just post to your own blog and have the comment be just one
sentence and a link to the post? Then BackType would be sending you traffic
instead of "stealing" your content.

So what are your goals here? Are you trying to monetize your writing, or are
you trying to prevent others from doing so?

~~~
briansmith
I prefer to comment on another person's weblog instead of commenting on my own
because (a) it keeps the conversation in one place and (b) the author is
almost sure to read the comment if I post it there. As a consumer of weblogs,
I find the comment saying "I've blogged a response: <url>" to be extremely
annoying. The lack of effective (spam-proof) trackback functionality is
another reason I avoid doing that.

Right now I'd rather not have my comments aggregated at all, anywhere. But, if
I change my mind, I want to be in control of the aggregation--who does it,
what content is aggregated, what details are disclosed, and how much I am
compensated for it.

I think eventually all search engines will have to do revenue sharing with
content producers. Because, while search engines provide a useful service
(even Backtype might be useful if it had a bigger index), they cannot exist
without content to index. Plus, search engines are increasingly competing with
content publishers (e.g. Google Knol, everything on Yahoo).

So, really what I am opposed to here is the opt-out (instead of opt-in) nature
of the republication. I would be less opposed to it if there was an effective
and convenient way to opt out of it. It seems right now the only ways to opt
out are to file DMCA complaints and/or lobby websites to exclude the spam
bloggers' robots in robots.txt.

~~~
mariorz
So, ideally for you, SEs would have to be opt-in and do forceful revenue
sharing with page creators?

You realize there is no way something like google could have been created in
your proposed environment?

~~~
briansmith
The internet in the 90's was so different from what it is now, it doesn't even
make sense to compare them.

SEs are already becoming opt-in for some sites. Extranets are a great example.
Some people are already building up robots.txt files that either exclude by
default, or they have long lists of blacklists that they add to whenever they
notice a new spider. For example, look at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt>. It disallows /reply? and /user?,
which is basically all the content on the site. I expect that a large
percentage websites will become more like opt-in instead of opt-out,
especially as the number of robots increases--eventually, there will be so
many robots spidering sites so frequently that bandwidth caps will be
exhausted just from the robots.

I don't believe in "forceful" anything. But, I do believe that large, popular
sites will make by making (exclusive) revenue sharing deals with search
engines in the future. And, robots.txt can be used to advance some social
policies too--for example, you could cut Yahoo off if you don't like its human
rights record. Copyright is what will enable those kinds of things to happen.

I also think that Google's domination of search will come to an end and there
will be more incentive for publishers to listen to offers that other search
engines make. Google is probably not going to offer revenue sharing (from ads
off SERPs) first, but I bet somebody else will. By this, I mean that the
search engine will share revenue from clicks with the sites that appear on the
SERPs that the clicked ad was on. It is the naturally evolution of SE
advertising, and it is the only thing that will make SE's increasingly
agressive use of publishers' and authors' content bearable for some people.

~~~
mariorz
I think you're confused, here is the robots.txt from this site (linked by you)

User-Agent: * Disallow: /x? Disallow: /vote? Disallow: /reply?

user is not disallowed anywhere, vote? and reply? and x? are, but they are not
content, they are actions, basically all of the content of this site is
indexed.

Your idea of site owners being selective about SE makes no sense to me. Would
users then have to use 5 or 6 different search engines to accommodate all
possible webmaster preferences?

~~~
briansmith
You are right, I thought the discussions had /reply? URLs but they are /item?.

I think that SE revenue sharing will happen. Only the SEs that share revenue
will survive--a SE that doesn't share revenue will get locked out of the most
valuable content and it will be forced out of business.

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Tichy
"conversations that may require our participation"

Nobody shall be wrong on the internet ever again!!!

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lemonysnicket
backtype = searchyc.com re-incarnated as a start-up (rather than a completed
side project)?

