On Sunday, Chris Pirillo posted some short Wall-E reviews from other people. He got those reviews by asking people on FriendFeed of what he thought of Wall-E. Now, some people didn’t like this. Can you ask others to generate content for you, and then post that content on your own blog, where you can make money off of it?

Well, I would have to say yes. First of all, Chris Pirillo also linked back to the FriendFeed pages of those that contributed to his post. Giving proper credit is important in the blogging world, and I think that Chris Pirillo did a good job of that in this case.

Also, I think that it is good for a blog to display the opinions of others, and not just through comments on posts. Not everybody bothers to read the comments. I like the fact that Chris Pirillo took the time to display the opinions of others, and not just himself, on his blog right in the spotlight. He didn’t stuff the reviews in a sidebar, put them at the bottom, etc.

But in the original FriendFeed post, Chris Pirillo didn’t tell those that replied to his original question that he was going to blog about what others’ had said. Was that wrong? Well, I think that many people quote without telling the original content generator about it. I don’t really see what was wrong about that.

Also, would there be a change in the responses if he had appended to his original request, “Just so you know, I’m going to post all these reviews on my blog.” ? I think so. All the people that didn’t approve of Chris putting the FriendFeed comments on his blog certainly wouldn’t have offered Chris a short Wall-E review.

If I were face-to-face with you, and I told you that I was going to conduct an experiment on your blinking, wouldn’t you suddenly become more conscious of your blinking when I’m around? I think that applies when you know what is going to happen to content that you submit.

But what’s really happened here is that Chris accidentally touched on a bigger issue, which is the question, “Who owns blog comments?”