Shooting at Bubbles

I’ve written a couple of posts about how I feel when it comes to Buzz and how it treats a blogger’s posts that we pipe into the baby social network. In the first post I wrote the following

There are times though where as a writer, or content producer, who uses Buzz as an auxiliary notification system I really get pissy with you. Unlike the Friendfeed or Twitter; or even Facebook, practice of either just posting the headline or the headline and an excerpt Buzz takes all our content and posts it .

Now how can I say this nicely: NOT!

Seriously DeWitt, Google doesn’t even do that to newspapers in Google News why would you do that to content producers in Buzz. And it’s not just the text either. This also extended to images included in posts. On one of my other blogs - Braincell Soup – I post a lot of art and illustration type posts which Buzz blindly pulls out all of the images and posts them.

Where is the initiative for readers to click through and actually read our blogs or God forbid sign up for our RSS feeds? Simple – there is none.

Now it is one thing to write about what one perceives as a problem but it is another when you actually get some data to back up one’s supposition. Such is the case with this problem of Buzz removing any incentive for people to click through and read the originating post as MG Siegler proves after digging into the numbers around posts at TechCrunch.

In a comparison to what Friendfeed still manages to send TechCrunch’s way MG writes

Looking over a handful of popular stores on TechCrunch over the past month, Google Buzz is nowhere to be seen anywhere near the top referrers. This, along with conversations I’ve had with others about their referrals leads me to believe that Buzz is actually quite horrible at doing the job it set out to do: share information. What’s the point of sharing links on Buzz and having other people comment and like it if no one is actually reading any of the content itself? The TechCrunch account has some 7,700 followers (and when you added in individual author accounts that also share our posts, we have well over 10,000 followers) and yet we’re seeing hardly any traffic from the social service.

Of course none of this will matter one bit to the majority of people but from a content producer’s point of view this is not good news. If I hadn’t already removed my blogs from being aggregated by Buzz this would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.