(Ok,  maybe even my “paraphrase” was not quite accurate.  See * at bottom of this post)

Dave Winer posted this morning Comments on NYT paywall announcement,  and this question is key for me re: Content providers.

But — since I am a frequent linker, I wonder why I should pay to read their site, when I’m delivering flow to them.

Many sellers do this.  If you send them members,  they pay for the reference,  either  in money or in credit toward services/content.

It’s REALLY easy to keep records of what links people come from to your site.  Shouldn’t the NY Times WANT people to be pointed to their content? I have been tweeting links for going on two years now,  and I’ve provided free recommendations/referrals of people to the content I link to;  and many of my favorite NetCasts and blogger/writers get traffic their way all the time.  (Not that I’m anywhere close on doing as many NYT links as Dave or many others,  but I can think of other orgs who would greatly benefit from making it even more worth my while to link to them—I do so regardless because I am dedicated to ramping up discussion of the use of  Social Networking and the Web by theological orgs.)

I am sure that Dave Winer has pointed me to hundreds of NY Times articles just in the past 3-4 months,  not to mention the tens of thousands  of followers he has on Twitter.

Why companies like the New York Times don’t (apparently) pay attention to such Net/Social networking  habits is baffling.

And Krugman.  Look at all the comments he already has on his article he posted just last night: it  has 245 comments.  There’s probably several examples of posts that had many more.  The Times ought to have some way of incentivizing comments,  maybe according to “likes” or “Recommend” s,  and have people to weed out trolls (that’s money to pay “social” people, yeah,  but look at the return possible in wider circulation from those comments,  as well as the incentives to link to the article.

NYTimes has done some interesting things in “Social” in the past (like “NYTimes People”,  which hasn’t, to my knowledge,  “taken off”,  but that ‘s the name of the game in Social.  Even Google has  learned that.

I am following  the usage and news re: the Facebook Comments plugin.  That is interesting.  But I am holding out until I can be assured that I can also capture those comments in my system AS  they or  even BEFORE they go “into Facebook”.  From what I’ve gathered so far,  this requires an API call to Facebook.  But no assurances about what metadata would be available for those comments so that I can remain flexible for future apps.  Such is the ever present problem with Silos (such as Facebook).  Companies will promise API’s,  and then hoard valuable data harvested from outside sources and claim it is  theirs since it’s their plugin.  Seems Twitter is already moving in that direction with their “requirements” re: Twitter  clients.

* Update:  Dave replied to my tweet notice of this post which tweeted the title above plus a  link to this article.  He replied:

 @davewiner:  @NYTimes –I didn’t say that, I asked some questions in that area. Was careful not say what should or shouldn’t happen.

Me: You’re right. But I did get the impression that you thought it would be a good idea for sake of getting people to them.

Me:  what did you think of where I took that impression/suggestion?

—Links on the names of the above are links to the original tweets