Martin Weigert's thoughts on the social web. And life.

I love the Shared Items feature in Google Reader. By following a few selected people with similar fields of interest as I have, I get access to a variety of sources that I personally didn't subscribe to. At the same time, I try to provide the peope following me with interesting and in my eyes relevant articles from the feeds I'm subscribing to in Google Reader. Give and take.

Still, even though I am a big fan of Shared Items, I always thought that putting the complete content from the shared articles into my stream of Shared Items felt kind of strange from a copyright standpoint. Shared Items are taking full blog posts or articles form its original source via RSS into a new layout on an external, public site, hosted by Google.

Fortunately, the Shared Items feature was one of the lesser known tools Google offered, so hardly anybody noticed this potential copyright issue.

But with the launch of Buzz, that might change. If you are using Shared Items in Google Reader, Buzz as a default setting is connecting those with your personal Buzz stream, showing all the pieces you shared directly within the stream - in full length, visible for everyone on your public profile.

Through Buzz, Google is for the first time exposing the feature to a wider audience, an audience of content publishers and media professionals that might not be that happy to see their content taken from its original source, imported to a public Google site. Eventually, that could lead to a removal of the complete Shared Items function from Google Reader. Which would be a pitty for those people who are using it "responsibly".

My suggestion to Google: Stop showing the full articles on destinations outside of Google Reader, instead highlighting only the first paragraph, linking to the original source. It wouldn't hurt the users who actively share items, it would generate traffic for the publishers and it could save Google some trouble.