Repost.us: The YouTube Of News Articles Lets You Embed News Stories Anywhere

SAN FRANCISCO -- YouTube videos are embeddable; why can't news stories be embeddable? That was the question asked at the Collaboration vs. Competition session at the 2012 Online News Association conference by founders of Repost.us, whose product does exactly that. Repost.us is a repository of millions of free articles from top publishers that others can "repost" (e.g. smartly syndicate) on their own sites using embed code that retains original content, links, ad tags, etc. You can embed the stories on your WordPress blog or Blogger blog or any other website with just a few clicks. On the other end of the spectrum, you can also syndicate your content for other publishers to repost. I'm a fan of this concept because it lets publishers control their own brand and track their content as it appears on different platforms, with an option of using their own ad tags and analytics to make money from that syndication. As updates are made to a piece of content, those updates flow through to all the other versions that are embedded on the web, and meaning publishers get full, true ownership of their content online. Don't want your competitors to reap the benefits of reposting your content? Or maybe you disagree with another site's mission and don't want your brand associated with it? Repost.us lets your essentially blacklist certain domains from reposting your content, and you can blacklist retroactively to remove your content from another site. In terms of SEO, Repost.us uses a javascript embed to render the content on the page, which search engines read as a link back to the original publisher, which can boost traffic back to the original source. The only red flag that might be a problem for some newsrooms is that content isn't editable by the site syndicator. If you repost a news article with a typo or factual error, you'd have to contact the original author to get it changed. As Jeff Jarvis says, Repost.us represents a reverse link economy. And it's about time (he's been writing about the concept since 2008). What do you think?

Fishbowl

Repost.us: The YouTube Of News Articles Lets You Embed News Stories Anywhere

Lauren Rabaino

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Lauren Rabaino