Take food bloggers as one example. If BlogBurst sign up, say, 100 of the good ones. With the rights grab, they may well be able to branch out into publishing recipe books, regional food books, you name it. Having signed a contract giving away all rights, the bloggers can’t do a thing about it. Just grumble.

That’s not to say BlogBurst would do this… but… they could….

Signing away all rights to your work is fundamentally a bad idea. No sane journalist, and I am one, would ever do this. It should be the same for citizen journalists. Maybe those who signed up don’t fully understand what they have done.

there’s an extensive debate about the value of full-post RSS feeds, see, eg the problogger’s wrap-up -

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/23/the-latest-full-vs-partial-feed-debate/

And even though I don’t want to go out of my way to defend blogburst, after all, I agreed with our decision not to join, I think you’re overly harsh in your assessment even though I believe you entirely understand their proposition: outsourcing the editorial task of sifting though blogs ans offering a qualified selection to online/offline editors of MSM outlets who do not have the competence or manpower to do this themselves.

Of course, just as the initial discussion of blogburst’s proposal in the blogosphere showed, they aren’t getting the pricing right, which may be a consequence of uncertainty regarding the own product or simply a matter of lack of funding. By signing over rights without any certain compensation bloggers *do* bear a disproportionate part of blogburst’s proposal.

The signing over of the rights may be a consequence of getting into business with partners like the WaPo, as I imagine they won’t be too happy to use material on their sites that exposes them to possibly costly lawsuits. That’s why I think they have that “non-revocable” clause in the content-provider agreement.

So that’s my take, their idea is valid, but the execution is, for whichever reason, less than optimal, certainly as far as the legal agreement is concerned.

The fact that they did not reply to a very kind email addressing these issues doesn’t increase my confidence in their long term ability to attract a sufficiently high number of high profile blogs they will need to pull this model off. Although – bloggers have been willing to prove Jeremy Rifkin’s vanity economics proposition right in the past.