I was wondering last night, as I was randomly thinking about new media things (as I am wont to do on occasion) that it was odd that in the kerfuffle around Shyftr that the actual Shyftr blog hadn’t mentioned anything about it.

{total aside: isn’t it odd that a service built around hosting conversation has *disabled* it on their own blog? — yes, comments are disabled.  EDIT: actually, according to Matt from Shyfter, they created their own blogging engine and never wrote a comments system.  The irony, however, still remains. :)}

Odd because in new media time (if we can narcissistically adopt a new speeded up time frame), waiting the weekend for things to develop I have found only tends to make things worse.  People start wondering why the wait, and then the conversation steers towards *that* and less towards the original reason why the conversation started in the first place.

Yeah, I’m lookin at you Steve Rubel and Richard Edelman.  This blogger hasn’t forgotten. :)

Long preamble, but it looks like the guys behind Shyftr have moved away from grabbing whole posts from RSS feeds to just the title.  In their own words:

With that in mind, we have decided to revise the format around our discussions. We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader. We deeply respect content publishers, and it is not our intention to cause unease.

What Shyftr has done now is to effectively become a social network *around* discussions of particular topics, rather than implicitly diverting 100% of the attention away form the original post.  I think this is a good thing, although I would have been just as happy if they had grabbed the first 100-200 words as well as a “summary”.

This move obviates my own qualms against Shyftr, which many bloggers seemed to have mistaken for qualms against controlling conversations, which is something I described that I never wanted to do (and tried to come up with a “funny” neologism, “hypo-stupid”, for bloggers who think they can do this).

Conversations happen everywhere, and we can’t really control that.  We can invent tools that can keep track of things, and we can *hope* that wherever the conversation goes, people remember who said what, and attribute appropriately.

If the latter happens faithfully, then I think its a bygone conclusion that “conversations will happen off-blog and bloggers have to suck it up“, because in truth, the karma will flow back to them, if not in terms of trackbacks, but in reputation, good will, and the knowledge that “yes — this blogger knows a few things worth a damn.”

And when that happens not only will bloggers suck it up, but will be happy to do so (both suck and blow?) in this kind of system that rewards everyone — perhaps not in the metric they initially envisioned — somewhat equitably.

To flog this blue metaphor a little more, in this system of sucking and blowing, it will ultimately be up to the blogger to maximize their reputation, if such is any goal of theirs, to their gain.  Traffic may not be a prize that is a worthwhile goal, but perhaps meeting new people, creating new personal nodes on your network *is*.

And that, arguably, is perhaps a better and more wortwhile end point for many bloggers.

(if you want to be pragmatic about it — yes, ultimately this leads to more links, more notice, more jobs, more opportunities, and really, just about more of everything).

tip://the inimitable mathew ingram

Update: Upon closer inspection, full feeds are still available when you use Shyftr as a private feed reader, which is perfectly fine to me.