As we tried to point out in our post, Flipboard’s new version is more than just an evolution, it’s a significant departure from what the service was all about. Until now, it has been about making it easy to discover and consume content from multiple sources, but the new features are all about turning readers into publishers — by giving them curation tools like those used by Flipboard’s own editors.

When advertisers become publishers

Flipboard’s move may seem like an obvious step, and one which combines some of the appeal of services like Pinterest or Tumblr. But depending on how Flipboard decides to proceed with these features, they could be very disruptive indeed. Here’s a couple of ways they could do that:

1) Advertising: Flipboard’s curation and publishing tools are not just for individual users, but corporations, existing publishers and brands — and one overlooked element of the launch is that Flipboard is building e-commerce functionality into the app. Chief technology officer Eric Feng said some advertisers are already creating their own magazines using both their own ads and content from other sources. Those magazines could then be selected and highlighted by Flipboard’s algorithms just like any other effort by a Flipboard user.

We’ve written a lot about the phenomenon of “native” advertising (and will be talking more about it at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York) as well as related concepts like sponsored content and what some call “brand journalism.” The idea is that brands and advertisers now have all of the same tools that traditional publishers used to have a monopoly on — that is, the ability to create and distribute interesting content and reach audiences directly. If a brand can curate content itself, and have its own ads with e-commerce features built in, why does it need a traditional magazine?

Revenue sharing with curators

2) Revenue: Flipboard already has some partnerships with media companies in which it gets to use more of their content directly in the app (instead of showing just short excerpts and then a “web view” in a browser) in return for a share of advertising revenue. When I asked Eric Feng whether Flipboard might consider doing a revenue share with individual users if they create compelling magazines from curated content, he said “that is something we are thinking about doing at some point in the future.” That’s not a promise, but it’s still an interesting idea, and potentially very disruptive in a number of ways.

If Flipboard provides the content and the tools, and the users who curate that content are generating a lot of value in terms of pageviews or “likes,” or whatever metric you want to use, shouldn’t those users get some benefit? Where this gets problematic is how Flipboard decides who gets what share of the revenue. If the ads come from a traditional media outlet, do they get the largest share or does Flipboard? And if media companies don’t want to play ball, does Flipboard just monetize their content anyway, the way Huffington Post and other aggregators do?

The idea that advertisers now have many of the same tools as publishers and traditional media companies do, and that readers and consumers of content also have much more power over that content than they used to, are two pretty inescapable facts about the new media landscape — and Flipboard has just staked a claim to some significant territory on both of those fronts.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / JJ Studio and Shutterstock / Eldorado3D

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Pulse is one of a number of news-recommendation apps that try to apply algorithms and other filters to suggest content to users — a group that includes Zite (which was acquired by CNN in 2011) as well as News360, Flipboard and Prismatic. Pulse was one of the first to make a big splash, in part because Apple founder Steve Jobs mentioned it on stage during the launch of the original iPad, and also because the New York Times accused the company of copyright infringement for aggregating its content.

Since its launch, Pulse has grown to the point where it has about 20 million users, but it’s still seen by many as a runner-up to Flipboard in the news-recommendation market, so an acquisition in the $100-million range would likely make sense for the company and its backers.

LinkedIn is becoming a media network

For LinkedIn, meanwhile, the purchase of a service that aggregates and recommends content from a wide variety of news sources would be an interesting extension of its recent moves to bulk up the media side of its business. When the company first launched its LinkedIn Today service — which aggregated news based on which links were shared within a user’s network of contacts — it seemed to some (including me) like a side project designed to primarily to drive traffic to the site, which was mostly being used as a place to store a resume or connect with potential employers.

Since then, however, the company has made a number of other efforts on the content side that are more ambitious — directed by former Fortune magazine staffer Dan Roth — such as the launch of the Influencers program, in which the site gets prominent personalities such as Richard Branson and Reid Hoffman to blog about topics of interest to its users. In many ways, this is analogous to what alternative blogging platforms like Medium and Svbtle have been doing (and WordPress seems to be interested in doing as well). (see disclosure)

So what could LinkedIn do with something like Pulse? Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has one idea, based on a video that Dan Roth made for a Fortune app that had LinkedIn integration — so that users could see who they were connected to at a specific company that was mentioned in the news. But while this might be useful to some, it seems a lot less interesting than using it as a kind of extension of LinkedIn Today: in other words, a way of recommending content that would target users based on their interests.

It’s all about the “interest graph”

As we’ve tried to explain a number of times, this kind of “interest graph” targeting is the holy grail for both content companies and social networks. It’s the reason why Facebook is constantly tweaking its news feed, and why Twitter is pouring resources into improving recommendation filters like its Discover tab and other features — and why Google is trying so hard to get people to share and “plus one” more content through its Google+ network.

If there’s one overwhelming reality of the digital age, it’s that we are all to some extent drowning in content from an ever-growing range of sources, and we all spend an increasing amount of time trying to filter out the noise and find the signal. LinkedIn has a large and growing graph of the social-network connections between people based on their work — a graph some believe could make the company an acquisition for someone like Bloomberg — and that could potentially be very valuable for users.

So a LinkedIn-Pulse combination might start as a version of the app that functions almost exactly like the current version, but also tracks content shared by a user’s business-related graph from LinkedIn, and then grows into a larger service incorporated into the site itself. And data from such a service would likely also be very interesting to Pulse partners like the Wall Street Journal, who use the app as a secondary method of distribution and subscription revenue.

And if such a deal does end up happening, of course, a LinkedIn purchase of Pulse would be just another example of a non-media company (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) establishing a powerful foothold in an area of the business that has traditionally belonged to newspapers and magazines.

Disclosure: Automattic, the developer of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Arvind Grover

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In his post at Digiday, entitled “Surviving the Media Aggregation Economy,” Morrissey argues that we are trapped in a digital-media environment based on boosting pageviews to draw more advertising, and that this has “taken publishers hostage.” Publishers like Business Insider, he says, have taken this approach to its logical conclusion and generate a lot of their revenue by repurposing content created by others. In one case, Business Insider posted a screenshot of a Digiday post along with a paragraph lifted from the original, and put a new headline on it. Says Morrissey:

“The result: It generated 224 pageviews for the Digiday story. Along the way, BI banked another 1,500-plus pageviews — and that many ‘welcome ad’ impressions along with multiple banners and a ‘native’ video ad. Meanwhile, Digiday’s original post — thought up and executed by our staff — got 2,500 pageviews. Is this a fair trade?”

It’s more efficient to aggregate than create

Morrissey goes on to note that Blodget likes to brag about how efficient his publishing platform is, and how his site gets an average of 180,000 pageviews per day per employee — orders of magnitude larger than many traditional media players such as the New York Times or Bloomberg. But the Digiday editor says much of this efficiency is driven by Business Insider’s repurposing of content created by others (Note: We’re going to be discussing alternate forms of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17). As Morrissey puts it in his post:

“Based on my experience, I can’t help but wonder if BI’s “efficiency” is bought at the expense of others. It’s like European countries bragging about low defense spending while relying on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting through NATO. It’s easy to be efficient when you draft off others.”

The debate expanded to Twitter when Blodget responded to Morrissey’s complaint, and suggested that if the Digiday editor was concerned about the screenshot of the images that appeared in the original, Business Insider would be happy to take them out. But Morrissey said his point was that the whole approach is wrong:

Business Insider argues Digiday should be grateful

Blodget argued that publishers like Digiday should be interested in exposing their content to as many different readers and potential readers as possible, and therefore Morrissey should be glad that Business Insider excerpted the post and included a link — something the Business Insider founder compared to a story that appears at Google News, or to the New York Times running a story based on a Wall Street Journal scoop:

Morrissey said that he was happy to have sites link to his content, provided they drove readers in substantial enough numbers, and that he was a big fan of the aggregation site Mediagazer as well as LinkedIn’s content portal. But in his post he noted that Business Insider had gotten close to 100,000 pageviews from content “aggregated” from Digiday, while the latter got a relatively minuscule 14,000 pageviews from Business Insider’s links.

Aggregation is a reality, whether we like it or not

It’s probably fair to say that versions of this debate have been going on for almost as long as the web has been around: questions about “link juice” and the “link economy,” in which traffic driven by an aggregator is supposed to make up for the alleged insult of excerpting their content, and so on. The Huffington Post used to be the poster child for what some have called “over-aggregation,” but now that mantle seems to have passed to Business Insider. And some believe that regardless of whether or not such behavior is legal or permitted under copyright law, it is unethical:

As I’ve tried to point out before, aggregation or curation is a fact of life in the digital age — just as record companies have had to learn to live with rampant downloading and sharing of music, publishers of all kinds are trying to get used to the idea that their content is no longer under their control. In some cases, aggregation fulfills a useful function, as it did in one notorious case involving a Forbes post by Kashmir Hill that was based on a New York Times feature. In other cases, the usefulness is debatable.

As Morrissey points out in his piece, until the financing model for online media involves something other than pure pageview-driven advertising revenue, aggregation is unlikely to stop. The only protection is to have content whose value can’t be summed up in a screenshot or a paragraph excerpt, and a relationship with your readers that is based on more than just how many pageviews you can generate. (Note: There’s a Storify of Blodget and Morrissey’s full conversation here).

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Zurijeta

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Paragraph Shorts is a little like a Flipboard for short stories, but rather than an algorithm, it uses humans to find short stories — in text, video and audio formats — across the web (from outlets like The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Moth), then aggregates them and distributes them through a free iPad app. When a Paragraph Shorts reader flips his or her iPad to landscape mode, social features appear, including the Twitter and Facebook streams of the stories’ authors and the magazines they were published in.

Paragraph Shorts aims to add value through curation, introducing readers to authors and publications they might not have known about otherwise. “By curating the best short stories, and offering them to people who might not have known they existed, Paragraph will create a link between great literary magazines and readers who are eager to kill fifteen minutes in a quality manner,” Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, said in a statement.

Of course, killing fifteen minutes reading a short story through an app doesn’t necessarily extend to a subscription to the publication it came from. But all the stories that Paragraph features are already free online, so the app’s main benefit to the stories’ publishers is to drive traffic to their websites and to increase social media around them. The company is also considering exclusive content at some point.

Paragraph founder Ziv Navoth previously ran marketing and partnerships at AOL. Paragraph is self-funded by Navoth and his partner, Edo Segal, who also run two other businesses: Enhanced ebook and app platform Holopad and ebook distribution platform Convertabook.com.

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Well, add another voice to that mix. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has published its assessment of the proposals, and the tone is sceptical to say the least. And, interestingly, one of the biggest problems ENISA has found has to do with big data.

The European Commission‘s proposals define the sort of data that has to be erased (if the data subject asks for it) in more than one way. Without wishing to get into comparison of various sections’ wording, here’s what ENISA has to say:

“[The definitions] leave to interpretation whether [personal data] includes information that can be used to identify a person with high probability but not with certainty… Neither is it clear whether it includes information that identifies a person not uniquely, but as a member of a more or less small set of individuals, such as a family.”

Here comes the kicker:

“A related question is how aggregated and derived forms of information (e.g. statistics) should be affected when some of the raw data from which statistics are derived are forgotten. Removing forgotten information from all aggregated or derived forms may present a significant technical challenge. On the other hand, not removing such information from aggregated forms is risky, because it may be possible to infer the forgotten raw information by correlating different aggregated forms.”

That’s a pretty big problem. If data gets aggregated and crunched by analytics software, you can’t say in all cases that the process can’t be reverse-engineered, particularly when you’re correlating different sets of derived data. But getting it out is, well, a challenge.

This isn’t the only problem ENISA’s identified. Here’s a tl;dr rundown of the report’s other comments and questions:

• When you have a photo on a social network that features multiple people, “who gets to decide if and when the photo should be forgotten?”
• The internet is not a closed system, and it spans multiple jurisdictions. “Enforcing the right to be forgotten is impossible in an open, global system, in general.”
• “Unauthorized copying of information by human observers is ultimately impossible to prevent by technical means.”
• You could try DRMing all data, but these things can be bypassed, and people wouldn’t like it.
• So what could work? “A possible partial solution may be a legal mandate aimed at making it difficult to find expired personal data, for instance, by requiring search engines to exclude expired personal data from their search results.”

ENISA is too politically savvy to just come out and say that the right to be forgotten is doomed, but they come pretty close.

Is it doomed? Quite possibly – which is a pity, in some ways, as it would be nice to avoid an inexorable slide into a world where people lose control over their own history.

As ENISA points out in its report, a fundamental problem with European laws such as this proposed revision to the data protection directive is that they need to be broad enough to be interpreted by member states in ways that fit with their national principles. Technical solutions don’t do ‘broad’. They need ‘specific’.

And with problems such as those highlighted by ENISA, good luck to the European Commission with nailing down those specifics in a way that pleases everyone.

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Stoke is hardly a new startup. It raised its Series A round back in 2004 from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Since then it’s racked up about $97 million, yet has remained relatively quiet except for a high-profile deal with DoCoMo in 2009. But Stoke may have just been waiting for the industry to catch up to its technology.

Stoke makes complex gateways that serve several functions on a mobile carrier’s 3G or 4G network: they can aggregate millions of cellular radio or Wi-Fi nodes, provide secure encryption for normally vulnerable IP LTE data traffic, and can shunt, or offload, over-the-top application traffic to the Internet before it clogs up the network core. Regardless of which use case or cases a carrier adopt the gateway’s central mission to is the handle the enormous deluge of mobile data traffic the smartphone has wrought.

Stoke first started selling its gateway as a 3G mobile data offload element, but couldn’t find any carrier interested, said Dan McBride, VP of marketing for Stoke. Carriers were experiencing enormous traffic spikes from the iPhone and Android devices, but they all said they weren’t interested in investing any more in 3G with LTE on the horizon, McBride said. So Stoke shifted gears and started positioning its product as a femtocell gateway and an LTE security and aggregation platform.

Femtocells didn’t exactly go gangbusters, but Stoke did begin winning LTE deals. The vendor has racked up 14 LTE contracts globally, McBride said, though apart from DoCoMo he wouldn’t reveal with whom. What’s more, with Wi-Fi’s new popularity among operators and the advent of small cells, McBride feels the marketplace doors are swinging wider. AT&T and Sprint are hinting at large-scale small cell deployments and wireline and wireless operators alike are bulking up on Wi-Fi access points– they will need something to secure and direct all of that traffic.

While Samsung’s cash is welcome, it wasn’t necessary to keep Stoke going, as it has been profitable for 18 months, McBride said. “It’s not the money that’s important – it’s not about operational funding,” McBride said. “It’s solely to bring us closer to Samsung.”

Samsung has made the rather audacious pledge to become a top three mobile infrastructure maker globally – a claim that would be almost laughable if it weren’t for some recent high-profile LTE wins such as Sprint’s Network Vision deal. If Samsung can really go the distance though — displacing half a dozen industry giants in the process – then Stoke would certainly enjoy the free ride.

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The company launched in 2008 and was supposed to help consumers find quality content but it stumbled, and only found success after it decided last year to target businesses instead. In practice, this means it has become a pure middleman, rounding up buckets of content and selling it not only to publishers but also to non-media brands like Orange or Johnson & Johnson.  Another client is entertainment app Fanhattan which uses NewsCred to offer a stream of movie and music related stories.

“All these companies have PR teams but they don’t have editors or journalists,” explains NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam. “PR content loses authenticity.”

The game changer in NewsCred’s approach is technology. The company provides API’s that make it easy for any site to bake in its own newsfeed, but it also offers tools that help firms control the fire hose of content they purchase. This means sites can get a stream of automated, customized content; in the case of brands, the fire hose can also be tweaked to ensure damaging stories don’t appear in the mix. The other advantage to the middleman, of course, is easy licensing. Sites like NewsCred don’t just provide content but also offer a one-stop shop for copyright clearance.

News agencies themselves are also embracing the middleman approach, launching a licensing service called NewsRight. The outfit represents 27 major players, including the AP and the New York Times, and is targeted at clipping services that monitor and collect news for businesses or governments.

Unlike NewsCred, the news agencies’ operation has a coercive edge (NewsRight says it’s not a “litigation shop” but one of its lead members, the AP, is suing one aggregator that won’t buy a license). But at the same time, it’s offering a similar product — big buckets of cleared content and technology to track, manage and customize it.

The rise of these middlemen also coincides with the end of a misguided experiment in which some newspapers used a law firm to sue businesses and bloggers that pasted their articles. That experiment, involving a copyright troll called Righthaven, engendered deep bitterness among readers and landed the lawyers in hot water.

It remains to be seen whether the new middlemen will be able to tailor their product to a small business or consumer level (wouldn’t it be great if a local restaurant or hair salon could pay $10 a month to dress up its website with a smattering of Bloomberg or Guardian articles?). But for now it seems the rise of frictionless, customized news streams are a step in the right direction.

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Updated: There’s been a minor furore brewing in the digital-content sphere over the past few days involving Readability, an app and web service that allows readers to save content from any website and read it later — without any of the advertising that most sites rely on for revenue. Not surprisingly, this idea doesn’t appeal to a lot of publishers, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball re-ignited the current firestorm of criticism with some comments about how the team behind Readability are “scumbags.” Whatever you think of Readability’s model, however, it is far from the only one providing this kind of service, and there is an argument to be made that its approach is actually better than some others. The bottom line for content creators is that users want to do this, and you need to figure out how to let them.

The latest wave of negative attention for Readability was triggered by AppAdvice, which noticed that when users shared an article that they had saved for later by posting it to Twitter or Facebook from the mobile app, the link included by Readability was to the saved version — the one stripped of all the ads and images and other content — instead of to the original at the publisher’s site. After AppAdvice flagged this issue and before Gruber made his “scumbags” comment, Readability then responded by changing the way it handles links in the mobile app, and admitted that its initial approach wasn’t fair to content creators (the web browser version includes a Readability bar that shows the original article in a frame, and allows users to click and see the stripped-down version).

Is collecting money for publishers a favor, or extortion?

Even after this change, however, the comments made by Gruber seemed to reverberate through the blogosphere, in part because they focused on another controversial aspect of Readability’s model: unlike other services such as Instapaper, which simply charges a standard fee for its service, Readability allows readers to donate money that is held for the creators of the content. Publishers can sign up and collect their share of this revenue (70 percent goes to publishers and Readability keeps 30 percent), but if they don’t sign up or register, then Readability just keeps the money. This model has drawn a lot of criticism from those who argue that it is effectively extortion:

@anildash When somebody collects money in your name w/out your consent (with a cut), it's called something else in many boroughs of NYC.

—
Kontra (@counternotions) November 18, 2011

Readability has its defenders, including Anil Dash — who is an advisor to the company, and argued in a blog post that the startup is trying to do what plenty of other services are trying to do: namely, to figure out a way for publishers and content creators to monetize their content in other ways apart from just lathering as many ads and other gimmicks onto their pages as possible. The fact that many users decide to strip out those ads and read articles through Readability or Instapaper, he says, shows that many publishers are actually shooting themselves in the foot by making their websites unreadable in an attempt to generate revenue (Readability’s own defence of its model is here).

The issue over Readability’s model is complicated somewhat by the tangled relationship between it and Instapaper, which was founded by former Tumblr developer Marco Arment. In 2010, the two companies formed a partnership in which Arment created a white-label version of Instapaper that Readability could use inside their iPhone app — but just as it was about to be released, Apple introduced its in-app subscription rules, which would have forced Readability to hand over 30 percent of any revenue they collected. The app was shelved, and Readability then went on to develop its own Instapaper-style app without Arment’s help, which caused some tension between the two — and between supporters of the two companies such as Dash and Gruber.

Readers want to do this — publishers need to figure out how

As Mike Davidson of Newsvine notes in a post on the issue, the bottom line is that services like Instapaper and Readability — and other similar apps such as Read It Later, or even Apple’s Safari browser, which has a “Reader” feature that strips out everything but text — are likely perfectly legal under current copyright laws, because users are saving copies of the content for their personal use (the news-aggregation app Zite got a cease-and-desist letter from some major content companies for a similar feature). Not only that, but Davidson makes a pretty persuasive argument that there is nothing wrong with Readability’s revenue model of keeping money for publishers.

The anger about the financial side of Readability seems to come from the opinion that the company is “keeping publishers’ money” unless they sign up, but I guess I look at it differently: I don’t think it is the publishers’ money. I think it is Readability’s money. Readability invests the time and resources into developing their service and they are the ones who physically get users to pay a subscription fee.

I think Davidson makes a good point — although it’s not one that most publishers are likely going to be that sympathetic to. But why is Readability’s model any worse than Instapaper’s or any other similar ad-stripping service? Marco Arment charges money for his apps and service, which take a publisher’s content and remove all of that advertising just the same way Readability does, and he keeps that revenue. Readability’s approach may feel like extortion to publishers who don’t like the idea of people altering their content or consuming it in other ways — but the reality is that this is happening all the time, whether the media industry likes it or not. It might be the Huffington Post aggregating your stories, or it might be Flipboard or Zite giving people a different way of seeing it, or it might be Instapaper.

At least Readability is trying to help publishers monetize that content in some way, by giving them a revenue share when they register with the service, as Clay Johnson points out. Is that an incentive to sign up? Sure it is. But at a time when content companies are trying everything they can to figure out how to monetize what they produce — whether it’s paywalls or apps or other subscription models — why not take advantage of a service that at least some readers have already shown they want, and are willing to pay for? Either that, or come up with your own version of Readability and compete.

Update: John Gruber has clarified his position in a new post, saying he doesn’t like the fact that Readability says 70 percent of a user’s monthly contribution goes to the content creators, since not all of that money is paid out — because the company only pays publishers who have registered. Gruber says the service should either make it clear not all of the money is paid to content owners, or it should split whatever it has among those who have registered. The way the company is doing it now “is misleading at best, and arguably dishonest,” he says.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zert Sonstige and Denise Chan

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The Pew Research Center has come out with a massive new report on the state of media as part of its Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it comes to a number of conclusions about where the industry stands — including the fact that Twitter and Facebook are still driving a fairly small amount of traffic to media outlets (although this segment is growing quickly) and that tech giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft control almost 70 percent of online advertising. But one other thing that becomes clear from the Pew report is just how big a role aggregators of all kinds — both human and machine-powered — are playing in news consumption.

Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, many newspaper companies and other traditional media outlets still seem to think the vast majority of their audience comes to them directly and prefers to read their content above all other sources. More than anything else, this is the core philosophy behind the rise of paywalls — which more and more papers are implementing — and also the millions of dollars that media companies have poured into developing iPad apps and other walled-garden-style approaches to news delivery. The assumption is that readers will want only the content that comes from that specific outlet.

Aggregation is a way of life for more news consumers

For many consumers, however, aggregators of various kinds are the way they consume their news now, whether through Web-based portals like Yahoo News or Google News or through a variety of newer aggregation-based apps and services — apps such as Flipboard, Pulse or Zite for the iPad, as well as services like News.me, Summify (which was recently acquired by Twitter) and Percolate. According to the Pew report, close to 30 percent of consumers get their news from a “news organizing website or app,” compared with the 36 percent who go directly to a media company’s website or app:

In effect, many users seem to be looking to generate their own digital-newspaper-style overview of the world rather than accepting one from a single media outlet, and if the content they are looking for comes from an aggregator like the Huffington Post because the original is behind a paywall, then so be it. The problem for media companies is that this kind of behavior is in direct conflict with most of the business models they are relying on for revenue, whether it’s advertising or app- and paywall-based subscription services — which is why media moguls like News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch continually accuse Google of “piracy.”

And the problem is actually even bigger than that, since the Huffington Post and Google News are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to aggregation and/or curation. Although Facebook and Twitter may not be huge factors in terms of news consumption at the moment — as my colleague Staci has pointed out at paidContent — with only 9 percent of users saying they get their news from those networks, that figure has grown by almost 60 percent in the past year alone, and it is likely continuing to increase.

Social sharing is both an opportunity and a danger

To some extent, that curation phenomenon is helping mainstream news organizations, because people are sharing links that get clicked on and drive traffic back to news outlets. This is especially the case with Twitter, since the Pew report notes that a larger proportion of users follow official media sources there, while a majority of Facebook users get their news from friends and family members. But just as with aggregation apps and services, the content that any single media company produces just becomes part of the sea of content that is distributed through these networks.

On top of that, Facebook itself is becoming much more of an aggregator of news, through the “social reading” apps it offers from outlets like the Washington Post and the Guardian. Although both newspapers have bragged about the number of people who have registered for their apps and shared content through them, the reality is that much of the benefit from that activity ultimately goes to Facebook — in terms of the time users spend on the site, the advertising they are exposed to, etc. — rather than to the news outlet.

Emily Bell, the former Guardian digital editor who now runs the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, noted in a response to the Pew report on Twitter that social platforms like Facebook are becoming “frenemies” for media companies, since they generate traffic but also suck up much of the benefit in terms of advertising:

Social platforms, esp Facebook looknews industry ‘frenemies’ – providing traffic while eating advertising bit.ly/xGdmpm (Pew)

— emily bell (@emilybell) March 19, 2012

What does all of this mean for media companies? More than anything, it means that trying to recreate the scarcity of content that used to exist in print — when media outlets controlled not only the creation of news but the platforms through which it was distributed — by using paywalls and subscription apps is fundamentally a losing battle. Many users want that content to be part of a larger digital experience, whether it’s through an aggregation app like Flipboard or through Facebook or Twitter. If your content is not designed to take advantage of that, you will be missing a larger and larger proportion of the audience you need.

One response to that is to shrink your audience down to those who will pay, as some outlets like the Financial Times have done and several of Rupert Murdoch’s British papers are trying to do. The other approach is to be as open and distributed as possible, to try to take advantage of the democracy of distribution instead of fighting it, and then to find other ways to monetize that audience and their attention, whether it’s e-books or live events or the “reverse paywall” model Jeff Jarvis and others have proposed. Either way, aggregation and curation are the new reality of media, whether media companies like it or not.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Denise Chan and See-ming Lee

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For some time now, the hot new buzzword for Web services has been “curation.” Whether it’s Pinterest or Tumblr or Flipboard or News.me, everyone wants to ride the curation wave. But what does it mean, and how do you do it properly? And what makes it different from aggregation? Those kinds of debates have been around in one form or another since the Internet was invented, but they have resurfaced lately thanks to two proposals. One is trying to come up with a “code of conduct” for curators and aggregators, and the other is promoting the use of special symbols to give credit to original sources. These efforts may be well-intentioned, but they are also misguided and likely doomed, as virtually every attempt to control the Internet has been.

The code of conduct (which its proponents emphasize would be voluntary, thankfully) is the brainchild of a group of journalists including Simon Dumenco, a media writer for Advertising Age magazine, who has complained vociferously in the past about being mistreated by outlets such as the Huffington Post who “over-aggregated” his content — that is, took too much of it, didn’t provide enough credit or committed a variety of other sins related to aggregation. While the Huffington Post has been a target of this kind of criticism more than any other new-media entity, largely because of its size; similar charges ricochet around the Web regularly involving a number of publications.

It’s called curation if you like it, aggregation if you don’t

We need MSM police far more than we blog police to enforce attribution. These guys are barking up the wrong tree. gawker.com/5892453/we-don…

— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) March 12, 2012

For anyone who has been around the blogosphere and the social Web for longer than a year or two, these discussions sound awfully familiar. Just a few years ago, some were advocating a code of conduct for bloggers, in part because of a violent cyberbullying attack on blogger Kathy Sierra. The problem with that effort was the same as it is with the current version: While it may be well-intentioned, no one who is actually doing the bad things that the code is supposed to prevent will pay any attention to it, as Gawker has pointed out. Those who choose to “over-aggregate” content, try to disguise the links they provide, or do dozens of other shady or unethical things will simply continue to do them.

We already have a way of giving credit: It’s called the hyperlink

In some ways, the attribution codes that Maria Popova — a masterful curator herself, through her Brainpickings website and related Twitter feed — wants to promote as a solution are both better and worse than the “code of conduct” idea. They seem like a more elegant and Web-native solution than a statement of ethical principles: a pair of codes that bloggers or any online publisher can include that provide credit to the original source of the content they are curating or aggregating. And yet, my suspicion is that virtually no one will use them, because they require too much effort.

And we already have a tool for providing credit to the original source: It’s called the hyperlink. Plenty of people don’t use the hyperlink as much as they should (including mainstream media sources such as the New York Times, although Executive Editor Jill Abramson said at SXSW that this is going to change) while others misuse and abuse them. But used properly, they serve the purpose of providing credit quite well. How to use them properly, of course — especially for journalistic purposes — is another whole can of worms, as Felix Salmon of Reuters and others have noted. And when it comes to curation and aggregation, it seems as though curation is what people call it when they like it, and aggregation is what they call it when they don’t.

In the end, this is a cultural thing, not something that can be legislated or imposed, either by a code or by inscrutable symbols. If you are a born blogger like Om or someone who lives and breathes the “link economy” (or whatever you want to call it), then you will understand good behavior and bad behavior. And you will know that eventually those who break the unwritten code or the ethical principles that have developed will get what is coming to them, because they will lose the trust of their readers — and trust, as we have pointed out before, is the new black when it comes to the media business. It can’t be measured or legislated, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Woodley Wonderworks

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