Blogrunning into trouble?

Blogrunner is the latest Blog Co. to capture people’s attention. It’s borrowed from the likes of Weblogs Inc., TechTarget, CNet (eg the whitepaper-centric BNet),  by targeting vertical markets that survive by borrowing kudos from the core brand.

You’ll forgive me for being cynical because Blogrunner is chasing a really old (but successful) publishing technique that my former employer IDG, and other trade publishers like ZiffDavis have employed for years. In fact, my new employer Fairfax also has plenty of good examples: GoodWeekend and Boss Magazine were spun out from the SMH and AFR respectively.

So it’s not impressive for being a new idea. What’s caught my attention is the company’s annotated version of the NYT. It’s a fantastic idea in concept - take the paper’s stories and wrap it in the context of fresh links from the blogosphere and stick RSS feeds on anything that moves. Read the story, read stories about the stories, comment on the stories. And even better is that all this ticks along despite the NYT’s user registration system.

However, what’s really different about this site in the context of the spin-out publishing model is that a rival business is taking advantage of the kudos offered by a primary news publishing business. I’m still unclear about whether NYT executives were involved in this site? I’m guessing not because if it were me I’d rather have an annotated version of my paper operating under my own domain.

There’s also a question of business ethics. The annotated NYT borrows the same web layout and design elements as NYT.com. At first glance I thought this was an official NYT site. They’ve even modified NYT’s logo.

But from what I can tell, there is no official relationship between Blogrunner and NYT - correct me if I’m wrong, but they’ve not made it clear on the site.

In short, I love the service. But the NYT is clearly missing a huge business opportunity by not operating the site directly. And my failing to stop Blogrunner, it’s established a precedent for other newspaper publishers.

And before I get attacked by the blog community for being a rampant capitalist, try the shoe on the other foot. What if someone set up a commerical business that relies exclusively on annotating your comments? Sure, the total pie of hits on your site might increase and the blogosphere is happier for it. But you’re now sharing Adsense dollars with a rival publisher. You’ve not entered a partnership agreement. It just happened beyond your control. Remember when some guys (who’s name I forget) started a blog that tracked changes to Dave Winer’s blog. Essentially the same concept, and Dave wasn’t a happy man.

Worthy of more discussion. 

(link via Dan Gillmor).