"But when you boil it down, the truth is that all these services are in their final form simply republishing content they didn’t create (even if through human editing or algorithmic editing there has been an editorial selection process)."
NO. NO NO NO NO NO.
Some are republishing links. Some are republishing extracts, which is legal under fair use. Some are repubishing full feeds for personal use, while grey is usually presumed ok as the presumption is that in publishing a full feed, you are saying that it's ok for people to read that in a service like Google Reader. Then some are republishing full feeds for commercial purposes, and that's splogging.
ghfghf
Thi
Duncan Riley
· 1 year ago
Sorry for the end there, Mashable went odd in FF3.
What I was trying to finish with was that this isn't anything like you suggest, and it certainly isn't new. The concept of splogging and fair use has been around for a very long time. That some people are tryying to cloak their splogging efforts in 2.0 is sad, but nothing more than a variation on the theme
Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
· 1 year ago
Duncan,
Don't get me wrong - I completely agree with you that from our perspective (those in the know) - they are completely different things.
How many bloggers are "in the know?"
I'm talking about the hordes of bloggers on MySpace, my mom, who just started her own personal blog - that friend of my uncle down in florida who's a doctor and an active politician, but barely knows how to operate anything other than the word processor on his MacBook...
Look at it from an objective eye, and you'll see the confusion I'm talking about. I know that there's fair use, using a feed fairly, and malicious intent.
Looking at it from the perspective of Google's algorithm, let's say, or a complete newb... quite a different matter. You and I have a well defined moral compass on what's proper and what ain't.
As is evidenced by this AP fiasco, a lot of folks don't.
My main point, though, is that our first instinct shouldn't be the whackamole game of takedown and sue. Our first instinct should be learning to deal with it in our business models (when applicable).
As someone who has published a 10 year old entertainment site that features 100% original content I see both sides of this argument. On the one hand, it's been a struggle to monetize our content, so any cheep way to get our name out there is a plus. The way Rottentomatoes used to be set up was a perfect way of doing this. We would get over a 100,000 clicks with them linking to our reviews.
The problem is Web User habits have changed, people just go to these aggregate sites, browse the headlines read the 1 paragraph intro and move on, without bothering to click to read the full text. So while the intent is good and proved in the past to drive traffic, it no longer does. So sites like RSSME, Google news, get all the traffic, with very little work or output on their part and the folks that actually create the content gets screwed.
Michelle
· 1 year ago
As someone who has published a 10 year old entertainment site that features 100% original content I see both sides of this argument. On the one hand, it's been a struggle to monetize our content, so any cheep way to get our name out there is a plus. The way Rottentomatoes used to be set up was a perfect way of doing this. We would get over a 100,000 clicks with them linking to our reviews. The problem is User habits have changed, people just go to these aggregate sites, browse the headlines read the 1 paragraph intro and move on, without bothering to click to read the full text. So while the intent is good and proved in the past to drive traffic, it no longer does. So sites like RSSME, Google news, get all the traffic, with very little work or output on their part and the folks that actually create the content gets screwed.
Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
· 1 year ago
(see Duncan, this is what I mean)...
Sites like RSSMeme and Google Shared Reader exist for the purpose of promoting the original content, and do quite well at it.
There's also not an insubstantial amount of work involved with the creation of these sites. It isn't writing work, but it is work none the less.
Cure Dream
· 1 year ago
Sigh.
You need to learn a little more about the dark side.
Splogs are "spam blogs". There are many kinds of splogs, not simply "someone who blatantly rips off content from a blog and publishes it with their own advertisements around it."
Some splogs have advertisements, some don't. Some do things that are so awful, you'd get kicked out of any ad network. Some splogs exist just to help a blogger who's starting out get from a technorati authority of 0 to 10. Other splogs are "cycle sites" that send tap an rss feed and send trackbacks to thousands of sites, accumulating inlinks that send traffic. Some splogs suck in content from blogs, other splogs generate it with markov chains.
The average blogger has little to fear from cycle sites and content-republishing splogs. They give you links. Few people are fooled about where the content comes from. If they're outranking you, fix your SEO. Improving your on-site will probably do the trick -- if they still beat you, you need some links. A few splogs of your own could help!
Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
· 1 year ago
I'll be the first to admit that my knowlege of the dark side is limited - I don't spend most of my days there (I only go over for the occasional visit).
Thanks for the information. I knew there were other reasons, but I really hadn't explored them deeply, and I figured my brief overview in the article was enough for the purposes of the point I was making.
awilensky
· 1 year ago
A man from an Eastern EU country came to FT R&D labs to demo what he called a "data Mining and republishing engine". It crawled and recompiled blogs, then re-wrote them using a thesaurus, so that the stolen posts look, at first glance, original.
Only the original author could know that it was plagiarized.
What is the use of such tools; are they in common use? I asked him:
He said, "maybe you could license it to re-copy term papers and re-sell them".
Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins
· 1 year ago
Hah. That's an amusing anecdote. I'm not sure where exactly I've mentioned it, but it's germane to both topics, so it was probably on my much more hopping thread below about John Reese.
Peter Drew, an affiliate marketer, is a fellow who's been creating this splog software that does exactly what you describe. Interestingly enough, they found in their case study phase that it was actually more profitable to create nonsense blog posts stuffed with keywords, and then create thousands of blogs on various root keywords (he sells this software to thousands of his downline, and the software creates at least hundreds of sites per day per instance).
It's unfortuate that some of the most advanced and aggressive semantic analysis work is being done by folks with the goal bankrupting the system.
Morgan
· 1 year ago
I love it-- the longer this goes on the more bloggers that have implicitly and explicitly advocated illegal music file sharing go on to complain about others using their writing 'for commercial gain'.
As if The Pirate Bay doesn't use other people's musical or film works to their own commercial gain. The place is riddled with ads.
They'll call it 'spam', say it clogs the search engines, blah, blah, blah.
The blogger's revenue is headed for zero, time to get with the program and build profit centers around anything but writing. Just like musicians apparently. Sell t-shirts or something.
BrianMojo
· 1 year ago
Bravo. Finally someone points out the two-faced nature of what bloggers have been saying about the music industry for so long now.
What really needs to happen is an evolution of RSS technology such that the ads and contextual information is carried with the content. Thus, people can get all of their information in one place while still supporting the authors -- just like people have been saying about integrating ads into television content such that it can be transported and advertisers are still getting exposure.
Matt Baker
· 1 year ago
You're describing the problem but not coming up with a solution. Which is, frankly, lazy.
You say information creators should "look at alternative ways to create business models around their content [...] Diversify, acquire, and above all bend with the wind."
THAT'S the thing that you need to answer. You can't say "content should be uncontrolled" unless you simultaneously tell creators specifically how they can monetize it.
For your next article, take a specific example. Show EXACTLY how to make money out of it. Better yet, actually DO it -- make money out of it -- and prove that it's got more substance than your "guessing" that it will (like your "guess" that the record companies might not have suffered if they had gotten behind Napster).
Michelle
· 1 year ago
Exactly. People always say you have great content and good traffic, why not use Advertising as though that answer is a panacea. I would love to see someone come up with a new model for monetizing content. We're going old school this year by publishing book collections this fall. EclipseMagazine.com And soon we're going to go with the news aggregation model mixing it in with our original stuff. But I still think other sites should at least ask permission first and not use full feeds - which a lot of syndication services now require.
Chris Matthieu
· 1 year ago
Bloggers should use Numly to copyright and protect their works. It's simple to use and amateur accounts are free.
David Jaeger
· 1 year ago
I think the music analogy is perfect. If you are making money off of your site - and monetizing it, having the RSS feed aggregators (or sploggers for that matter) sending your content to other interested users is free branding to people who wouldn't otherwise read your content. Hopefully- and in most cases, they will eventually go back to your site.
Just like free music is great for a new or existing artist to gain a following for their shows.
Are you going to have some lost revenue- yeah. Are some people going to misuse your permission and content for their own purpose - yeah. Don't let it get personal, and realize that the benefits far outweigh the risks.
Some of the sploggers do indeed remove the link to the original article - which is illegal, but if they keep the original link (w/o a nofollow), who cares?
All Comments
I agree though - there will always be rip offs in the blogosphere. You just have to make sure you're 10 steps ahead of everyone else.
Dan
http://www.themodernman.com/
"But when you boil it down, the truth is that all these services are in their final form simply republishing content they didn’t create (even if through human editing or algorithmic editing there has been an editorial selection process)."
NO. NO NO NO NO NO.
Some are republishing links. Some are republishing extracts, which is legal under fair use. Some are repubishing full feeds for personal use, while grey is usually presumed ok as the presumption is that in publishing a full feed, you are saying that it's ok for people to read that in a service like Google Reader. Then some are republishing full feeds for commercial purposes, and that's splogging.
ghfghf
Thi
What I was trying to finish with was that this isn't anything like you suggest, and it certainly isn't new. The concept of splogging and fair use has been around for a very long time. That some people are tryying to cloak their splogging efforts in 2.0 is sad, but nothing more than a variation on the theme
Don't get me wrong - I completely agree with you that from our perspective (those in the know) - they are completely different things.
How many bloggers are "in the know?"
I'm talking about the hordes of bloggers on MySpace, my mom, who just started her own personal blog - that friend of my uncle down in florida who's a doctor and an active politician, but barely knows how to operate anything other than the word processor on his MacBook...
Look at it from an objective eye, and you'll see the confusion I'm talking about. I know that there's fair use, using a feed fairly, and malicious intent.
Looking at it from the perspective of Google's algorithm, let's say, or a complete newb... quite a different matter. You and I have a well defined moral compass on what's proper and what ain't.
As is evidenced by this AP fiasco, a lot of folks don't.
My main point, though, is that our first instinct shouldn't be the whackamole game of takedown and sue. Our first instinct should be learning to deal with it in our business models (when applicable).
The problem is Web User habits have changed, people just go to these aggregate sites, browse the headlines read the 1 paragraph intro and move on, without bothering to click to read the full text. So while the intent is good and proved in the past to drive traffic, it no longer does. So sites like RSSME, Google news, get all the traffic, with very little work or output on their part and the folks that actually create the content gets screwed.
Sites like RSSMeme and Google Shared Reader exist for the purpose of promoting the original content, and do quite well at it.
There's also not an insubstantial amount of work involved with the creation of these sites. It isn't writing work, but it is work none the less.
You need to learn a little more about the dark side.
Splogs are "spam blogs". There are many kinds of splogs, not simply "someone who blatantly rips off content from a blog and publishes it with their own advertisements around it."
Some splogs have advertisements, some don't. Some do things that are so awful, you'd get kicked out of any ad network. Some splogs exist just to help a blogger who's starting out get from a technorati authority of 0 to 10. Other splogs are "cycle sites" that send tap an rss feed and send trackbacks to thousands of sites, accumulating inlinks that send traffic. Some splogs suck in content from blogs, other splogs generate it with markov chains.
The average blogger has little to fear from cycle sites and content-republishing splogs. They give you links. Few people are fooled about where the content comes from. If they're outranking you, fix your SEO. Improving your on-site will probably do the trick -- if they still beat you, you need some links. A few splogs of your own could help!
Thanks for the information. I knew there were other reasons, but I really hadn't explored them deeply, and I figured my brief overview in the article was enough for the purposes of the point I was making.
Only the original author could know that it was plagiarized.
What is the use of such tools; are they in common use? I asked him:
He said, "maybe you could license it to re-copy term papers and re-sell them".
Peter Drew, an affiliate marketer, is a fellow who's been creating this splog software that does exactly what you describe. Interestingly enough, they found in their case study phase that it was actually more profitable to create nonsense blog posts stuffed with keywords, and then create thousands of blogs on various root keywords (he sells this software to thousands of his downline, and the software creates at least hundreds of sites per day per instance).
It's unfortuate that some of the most advanced and aggressive semantic analysis work is being done by folks with the goal bankrupting the system.
As if The Pirate Bay doesn't use other people's musical or film works to their own commercial gain. The place is riddled with ads.
They'll call it 'spam', say it clogs the search engines, blah, blah, blah.
The blogger's revenue is headed for zero, time to get with the program and build profit centers around anything but writing. Just like musicians apparently. Sell t-shirts or something.
What really needs to happen is an evolution of RSS technology such that the ads and contextual information is carried with the content. Thus, people can get all of their information in one place while still supporting the authors -- just like people have been saying about integrating ads into television content such that it can be transported and advertisers are still getting exposure.
You say information creators should "look at alternative ways to create business models around their content [...] Diversify, acquire, and above all bend with the wind."
THAT'S the thing that you need to answer. You can't say "content should be uncontrolled" unless you simultaneously tell creators specifically how they can monetize it.
For your next article, take a specific example. Show EXACTLY how to make money out of it. Better yet, actually DO it -- make money out of it -- and prove that it's got more substance than your "guessing" that it will (like your "guess" that the record companies might not have suffered if they had gotten behind Napster).
Just like free music is great for a new or existing artist to gain a following for their shows.
Are you going to have some lost revenue- yeah. Are some people going to misuse your permission and content for their own purpose - yeah. Don't let it get personal, and realize that the benefits far outweigh the risks.
Some of the sploggers do indeed remove the link to the original article - which is illegal, but if they keep the original link (w/o a nofollow), who cares?