LinkedIn moving against bloggers?

Dave Winer (@davewiner) raised some good questions about LinkedIn’s plan to create it’s own version of Instant Articles ala the version already in place at Facebook.

From a technical standpoint, why have “a proliferation of mostly-compatible feed formats,” per Winer. Developers are already creating one for Facebook.

Bigger yet:

[W]hy just just with publishers? Why not talk with bloggers? I think ultimately this will be a similar kind of mistake to the ones that political parties made. Publishers are like big donors. Bloggers are equivalent to voters and grassroots organizers.

The bloggers haven’t gone away, big platform people, it’s just that you don’t see them because your platforms aren’t accommodating us. If you tweak things, just a little, you’ll find we’re even better friends than the big publishers. Get your thinking out of the 20th century box.

A LinkedIn spokesperson told Buzzfeed’s Alex Kantrowitz (@kantrowitz), Weiner’s source, that:

Publishers remain a very important part of our content ecosystem and we are in regular conversations with them about new ways to work together. Our goal is to ensure we get the right content in front of the right member at the right time to deliver the best member experience possible.

Publishers, by definition, includes bloggers, but from the Buzzfeed story it sounds like LinkedIn is talking to limited number of traditional publishers in an attempt to make LinkedIn a leading source of business news.

Social networks and publishers with big brands want to get publishers, including bloggers, to publish on their platform and not ther own blog. Medium, Facebook and LinkedIn are the biggies.

That’s a mistake. They ought to be shining a lot on bloggers by running blog posts in entirety, which are first published on the blogger’s site. They ought to recognize that the power of personal publishers lies in having your own site. It’s your independent site that keeps you going and producing more media.

It’s the media the social networks and large digital publishers are after, not search and an independent site which professionals who are blogging want. Getting the blogged content gets a social network like LinkedIn more ad revenue. Professionals who are blogging do so to build relationships and reputations, ad revenue is not what they are after.

Running bloggers’ posts, while recognizing the power of independent sites, gets the social networks and large publishers great content. No one is going to cover niches that need covering like a professional with deep expertise blogging with a passion.

Embrace blogging for what blogging is like Google. In Google’s case blog posts at the top of relevant searches. It’s a win-win.