I had the first opportunity this evening to dial in to the Elite Tech News podcast, hosted by Mashable's Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins, covering the hot topics of the week's activity on the custom elite tech news Reddit.

This week's discussions centered around mobile phones as distractions to walking or driving, how stolen data is so plentiful that the market has evaporated, the ongoing Yahoo!/AOL/Microsoft/News Corp dance, Last.fm leading to new music sales, and the weekend's hot topic of commend fragmentation from blogs to FriendFeed and RSS readers, like Shyftr.

Also participating on the call were WinExtra's Steven Hodson, Webomatica's Jason Kaneshiro, and Frederic Lardinois of the Last Podcast. MG Siegler of ParisLemon and Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests were unable to make it this week, but should be regular contributors.

You can access the full download of the podcast on the TalkShoe site: L33t Tech News

Also, to get the Elite Tech New Podcast in your iTunes, subscribe to the podcast for free. Once this week's is posted, you'll be all caught up. You can also listen to the last few weeks' archives.

Friday night's discussion around the fragmenting of comments between blogs, FriendFeed and RSS readers grew well beyond what I had expected. While the issue of comments and where they should live, relative to the original blog, has come up before, new entrants to the market, like Shyftr, Plaxo and AssetBar made some uncomfortable about how their full feeds were being utilized. After a few days of some high-profile trashing, as well as some supporting posts from people like Robert Scoble and myself, Shyftr has capitulated, by pulling full feeds where discussions are taking place, while retaining full attribution, in hopes to quell fears about stealing the conversation away from bloggers.

In a post this morning (RSS Feeds, Community, Publishers, and Revisions), Shyftr's founder, Dave Stanley, reiterates the key goal of Shyftr, namely:

"Shyftr was developed to help people find and subscribe to publishers that they otherwise would have never found on their own, through the community and network of friends. Having a community where people can share and discuss the feeds they read helps to facilitate this goal."

But, as mentioned, not everyone liked Shyftr's plan to have full discussion on the full feed, so given some of the feedback, Shyftr has adjusted their approach. Stanley's post shows that for those feeds which enable discussion, Shyftr will no longer show full feeds. He writes:

"We have decided to revise the format around our discussions. We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader. We deeply respect content publishers, and it is not our intention to cause unease."

You can see how this has changed by looking at some of the commented posts within Shyftr, including one from Tony Hung (Fine, I'll Say It: Shyftr Crosses The Line), another from Mashable (Shyftr: Good, Bad, and Potentially Quite Ugly) and mine from Friday. (Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?)

I made my opinion clear on Friday that I personally had no problem with what Shyftr was doing. Sarah Perez's initial coverage of Shyftr on ReadWriteWeb (Social Feed Reading With Shyftr) didn't bring up fractured comments as an issue, nor did my coverage back on March 4th. (Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings). Corvida of SheGeeks was the only one to bring up the issue prior to this weekend, that I can tell, in her review: Google Reader Trumps Shyftr.

Unlike some have speculated, Shyftr is not on the dark side of the Web, a content scraper or a splogger (spam blogger). Instead, the service is trying to grow and find a niche where friends can share and comment on feeds, and over the last few months, I've grown to like the service and respect the individuals behind it, so I hope they can overcome this blip and work with the blogosphere.

I expect that over time, the RSS community will band together and find a great way to cross-pollenate comments from Readers to bloggers, and all will be one. You can see Nick Halstead's post on the Fav.or.it blog (Fractured Commenting - Again) where he offers Shyftr use of the fav.or.it API to do just that. I don't think we're all that far away from getting this issue solved. Luckily, Shyftr is listening and already making change. The question is, will these changes be enough? If you had issues with Shyftr's approach, let me know what you think about their update.

You can also find me on Shyftr here: http://www.shyftr.com/profile/louisgray

One of the more frequently mentioned suggestions for avid Google Reader users is the addition of comments to the service, so RSS readers could respond to blog posts, either directly from the reader and back to the originating blog, or within the Google Reader community itself, in effect, becoming a social network. But while Google Reader has not yet enabled comments, other services are, and it seems the excitement of adding this capability is hardly universal - and its opponents have gone so far as to call it "outrageous" or "theft".

While the discussion around where a blog's comments should reside has raised its head before, especially around services like FriendFeed, (See: Sarah Perez of Read Write Web: Blog Comments Still Matter) it flared up again this afternoon when I had (innocently, I thought) highlighted how one friend's blog post from earlier in the week was getting a lot of comments, and had become the most popular story on Shyftr, a next-generation RSS feed reader that enables comments within its service.

While I had hoped the author (Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist, who I highlighted on Monday and like quite a bit) would be pleased to see his post had gained traction, the reaction was not what I had expected. He said he was uneasy about seeing his posts generate activity and community for somebody else. Another FriendFeed user called it "content theft" and said "if they ever pull my feed and use it there, they can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice". (See the discussion here)

I can see how content creators can feel threatened or wary of services who leverage full RSS feeds, or might actually have a case if they have publicly asked for no repurposing of their content, via Creative Commons or other methods. But I also see that the whole idea of reading feeds in isolation, without engaging, is going to soon be something of the past. AssetBar, Social|Median and Shyftr have been among the first to add comments in their site. Fav.or.it, via Disqus, offers the ability to post comments to the originating blogs. FriendFeed, RSSMeme and many, many others offer links to the content but contents on their site. And that's not even touching on the social news sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc., where comments and community are generated, essentially through leveraging third party headlines.

As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog's RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog. It would behoove me and other bloggers to be aware of the other places the conversation will be taking place, and to engage there, in my opinion, rather than railing against the continued evolution of how we're consuming content and engaging online.

Even the conversation about this issue has escaped the blogosphere. Eric, on FriendFeed writes, "It's slightly troubling that this conversation is taking place here instead of on one of our blogs," but it's not so much troubling in my mind, but instead requires a changing mindset.

The Web as a whole has clamored for full RSS feeds, not partial, so we don't have to return to the originating site. Some of us have just as loudly asked for comments and conversations to enter the world of the RSS feed reader. Now that we're starting to see what it's like, maybe it's not what we had fully anticipated. But it's the way things are headed, and rather than label innovators like Matt Shaulis (Twitter | FriendFeed) and Dave Stanley of Shyftr (Twitter | FriendFeed) as outrageous or possibly illegitimate, we should engage and speak up about what we think is right. As for the developers who enable these services, there are definitely ways they can help raise the visibility of the practice - through e-mail alerts, trackbacks, or even giving the option to opt out. But we'll be seeing this more and more going forward. I promise you that.

Though I didn't mention it here, Tuesday, April 8th was my birthday, an event I surprisingly share with social networking star Chris Brogan. While Chris got introspective in a piece called "Who Am I Really", I for the most part let the event pass. After all, to me, last year's milestone was more of a big deal. (Today, Turning 30, I Get to Start Feeling Old)

But while I downplayed my birthday, my wife didn't completely ignore it, even though we were on opposite sides of the country virtually all week.

You see... she sent me an e-mail that evening, saying I'd been signed up to "what I always wanted".... a Bacon of the Month Club. That's right. Bacon. Now, once a month, for a full year, I'll get a new package of bacon, as well as a "Bacon of the Month" ballpoint pen, free t-shirt, and a toy pig, among other hoggy eccentricities.

This new Bacon of the Month diet plan will fit in nicely alongside the shakers of "Bacon Salt" I picked up last December, in the goal of making every meal have a taste of bacon. If you're into bacon, you should try it for sure.

So what's her ulterior motive here? To reduce the number of birthdays I have remaining? To make sure that I stay heavier than she does even as she grows with our twin pregnancy? Not sure. All I know is that on my desk at work I have a new package from the Bacon of the Month club daring me to open it. Yummy.