How would a human differentiate between the original source for a piece of content on the web, and a syndicated or splogged copy?
One of the most important factors would almost certainly be the comments.
What is one of the primary reasons people click through from an RSS feed to actually visit a blog?
Almost certainly it is either to read comments others have made, or to make one of their own. It is not to view advertising... at least for most.
How would a machine, such as Google differentiate between original source and whether a piece of content is valuable to include in its search index?
Factors could include:-
- The content within comments - keywords, language structure, length etc
- The number of comments
- Update frequency of the page (gaining additional comments over time)
Sure there are other factors, such as links
People link to comments on blogs, typically using a #fragment - the link is going to the blog permalink page
How many times have you found the answer to a question by reading a blog comment?
For me it is actually quite frequently - comments quite often provide alternatives to the original content that offer improvements.
A large part of blogging is engaging your audience in conversation
Business blogging is about engaging your customers
It hasn't happened yet, but soon a blog might become no more than an RSS feed that is read on another domain, and discussed in small communities of friends, sometimes private, sometimes public, but still fragmented conversation.
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