So I’ve ranted a bit on blogburst recently — here’s a follow up. Reuters is now partering with BlogBurst to syndicate blog content throughout the world; this is no surprise as Reuters invested a sum of money in Pluck, the parent company of BlogBurst some time back.

What does this mean for Bloggers? Well, if your blog is accepted at BlogBurst, your blog’s content (that is, selected posts) could be up for syndication on on-line news sites to some pretty far away places — which is cool, I suppose. There’s always a thrill telling your friends and family “Hey, my blog is syndicated on the Ayre Daily Register!” But the other possibility is that it could be picked up by some pretty prominent media properties that Reuters now syndicates to already.

From Blogburst’s point of view they’ll either take the approach of signing up more bloggers to syndicate across a greater number of media properties — OR, they’ll start syndicating the existing blogs up across those newer properties; or probably, a blend of both.

If they take more of the first, however, it would have serious implications with their “compensation” strategy, as they continue to only reward the top100 blogs according to a “whoever has the most post views per month”. While its a good first step, I think that they need to make it more equitable for bloggers.

As it stands the vast majority of blogs are allowing newspapers to syndicate their content, effectively for free — and I don’t really buy the “branding” proposition that blogburst sells bloggers on; I have never gotten a single click through in the hundreds of post views on The Statesman, for example (except for the one I tested myself), and I can’t attribute any traffic on this site to my blogging offerings on The Statesman.