Content gang, let's get rules/tools for sharing

This great question from Download Squad leads me to wonder about branded social sites vs. modular social tools on content sites:

If I want to put a cool movie trailer, a funny Comedy Central clip, or a news clip on my Web site, why do I have to go to YouTube, where some kid has uploaded it in violation of the owner's copyright, and where as likely as not it'll be yanked a few days later, in order to do it? I'm talking about stuff that's already on the web -- Comedy Central puts the best clips from its shows on its own web site, as does NBC for Saturday Night Live, and Apple.com has all the best movie trailers. But while I can stick a pirated clip from YouTube on my Web site with two clicks, there's usually no simple, straightforward way to do the same thing from a legitimate site.

Keep in mind this isn't someone wanting to grab the clip itself and serve it from his or her own site. This is someone wanting to embed a video player that runs the clip from its source site, along with any commercial messages that source site chooses to place inline. Each party's hands stay completely in his or her own pockets.

Traffic from embedded players no doubt makes up a huge chunk of the YouTube universe, which is why the social-video network provides easy ways for bloggers and other site operators to embed players for specific clips. Ditto Flickr's easy widgets for still photos and collections, and all the programming interfaces for social bookmarking and meme tracking, a la del.icio.us and digg.

Content providers who make their payroll on advertising adjacencies worry that such open sharing will pull the wheels off the gravy train -- thus reluctance even to publish full RSS feeds of article-length text. That's understandable to a great extent: most RSS ad networks, besides being a marginally distasteful user experience, also don't do much to feed the bulldog. Many don't seem to have enough inventory to target ads to specialty content, so what do you get? House ads for the ad network itself.

But I just don't think it will be that long before content, advertising and technology concerns figure out some easy ways to syndicate high-value content with appropriate commercial messages in tow. Once that happens, content providers get paid for adjacencies, advertisers get better-targeted distribution and people who want to embed syndicated content get the tools to do so.

At that point, do you think branded services specifically designed as social content interchanges will still have a reason to be? I don't know, honestly. But I do see a trend of new functionality emerging first as a branded site or service, then eventually becoming a modular component or tool that can be used, unbranded, in other contexts. Update (5 p.m. ET 10/18/06): Of course, MySpace social networking components will interoperate with other sites only when we pry them from MySpace's cold, dead fingers.

The only thing I know with some certainty is that the Web makes sharing easier than not sharing. If more views theoretically mean more value for advertisers, we should be able to find a way to reconcile our business models with the near-inevitability of online content sharing.

Update (8 a.m. ET 10/19/06): Jeff Jarvis wonders what it would mean for news organizations to offer such programming interfaces for sharing their content.