I just had a phone conversation with a woman from gather.com,
who wants to republish my blog posts, especially the media criticism. Does anybody
have any opinions about this site? Is there any advantage to my posts having
two permanent locations and two comments streams?
Well, the Boston Globe on the subject. Not sure there’s anything wrong with them as people, it’s more that most commenters seem to be hugely sceptical that they’ll survive. Would you have shared yer copy with about.com or the delightful Mr. Calacanis?
Having looked at gather, I think I’d be more interested in it as a writer if they included links back to my own blog. As near as I can tell, the only incentives they offer are a cash reward (to be determined in the future, hence, vaporcash for now) and being read, which I can accomplish on my own.
There’s the potential reward of building more name recognition, but most of my efforts to do that online are a means to drive readers to my own sites.
If there are any significant drawbacks, other than (possible) brand dilution, it would be the difficulty of following the comment streams for both your blog and the content you post there. That’s not a huge issue… but, with such minor incentives to join, I’m not really sure why you’d want to split your readership and your focus?
Okay, having looked deeper now at Gather, I’ve changed my mind a bit. Since you have to manually post your content there, it’s easy enough to throw in a link to your site, blog or post with every entry. So, that strikes out my first two paragraphs above. Now if it’s possible to set up an RSS feed to track comments there (for the sake of focus), then I could see it being worthwhile.
Stil probably not as useful as a squidoo lens, but I guess I’ll see how it plays out.