[demallien]

When I look at my own behaviour as web content consumer, I'm obliged to feel that the bloggers are in the right here.

For example, when I read Daring Fireball, I very often read the quote that Gruber has chosen from an article, and am interested enough to click through and read the whole article, so that I can appreciate the context of the quote. Gruber's aggregation of content + commentary, is actually generating traffic for the source site.

I can't help feeling that this whole debate is triggered more by the fact that newspapers don't know how to turn web pages served into dollars. Attacking blogging aggregators is just clutching at straws, as they haven't managed to resolve this fundamental problem...

[sounddust]

I think that you picked a rare counterexample to the normal behavior of bloggers. Gruber does not write like most bloggers; he does an excellent job of finding interesting articles and piquing interest in them without using a large amount of their content. When his posts are long, you can bet that they are full of original ideas and material.

In the Gawker example, the blog post is eight paragraphs long, four of which are lifted directly from the source and the rest summarized from the most interesting parts of the source.

I think that if everyone blogged like Gruber did, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.