A principal function of blogs is the opportunity for the author to give an opinion, share knowledge and express anything they think, however, during the evolution of blogs, functions and uses have diversified. One of these new uses are the “Repost” or “Republish content“.

What is the repost?

The repost is mainly repeat the information posted on another blog or website using a summary and a link to that source.

Today many new blogs are born and living on just repost. But is it a problem? Is it a new way to connect and distribute information? It is certainly an issue that creates controversy, try to see the advantages and disadvantages has this way of keeping a live blog for everyone to form an opinion.

Advantages

• Improving the distribution of valuable information to be republished in many blogs.
• More global information, when this republic is in several languages.
• The information arrives faster to the user as there are many places to find a story. Particularly useful in sensitive news.
• Create new connections between blogs, bloggers and readers.

Disadvantages

• It creates a lot of redundant information. Difficult to filter the information “original” of information repeatedly.
• The value of the republics is less than the original publications, creating many blogs of little value compared to the original sources.
• Makes the process inefficient to reach the original source. It is common in search results, two or three of these relate to the same rule, reducing the diversity of sources and more time to find “different.”
• The repost may be inaccurate and do not convey the original idea or even erroneous information.

Conclusion

The repost is a long time in the conventional media, is a “bad” necessary, there are issues on which it is very helpful, as when material is free republic and reaches more people, but there are many more issues where, if not republication is accompanied with a personal contribution, only noise is created, which also has value, but almost nothing over the original content. I think some of the occasions the repost is to put a lot of information on a site without much effort or calibration process, when that happens, it can be negative.

What do you think?

It is certainly an issue to discuss is that, all in one way or another we did repost because information can rarely be 100% original and independent, but already talking about the repost as a complete system to think what a blog of blogs that are only repost? How about some blogs of years now are based primarily on the repost? When it is useful and when not?