DISQUS

Great writing piece! Well written, easy to read, insightful, important, what can I say? You hit all the right notes. Good job.

Maxtor's plugin... c'mon! its maxpower! ;)

This is really good news indeed, I'll have to update the plugin to reflect this new info.

Cheers!

It seems to me that Google is going to have to revisit the Adsense game. With so many millions of pages of generated and scraped content existing solely for the purpose of creating money off of waylayed Internet searchers, advertisers are going to get fed up with increasingly diminishing returns.

Sooner or later someone is going to come up with an Advertising product / service that only accepts quality sites of real utility.

How would one discover if they had been previously plagiarised by the fine folks over at bitacle?

Wow. Putting together that DMCA must have been tedious! I'm anticipating the results -- do share! Also, the trackback on this post from 'Adsense planet' comes from a splog.

Cheers!

Thanks for your feedback regarding this plugin -- your thoughts are well received and written fairly. The issues you present can and will be addressed over time. Many people have already requested that their fingerprint be automatically inserted in posts when published, hopefully the next version will include this feature.

While this plugin is only as strong as search engines' ability to index splogs, sites that don't get indexed probably aren't that important in the big picture. Can it be easy to make money splogging if you aren't in the major indexes? I think not, but I could be wrong.

Then again, stealing is stealing although with copyright issues, I understand that the magnitude of the offence is partly determined by 'actual damage'. So basically I'm all over the map with that one.

As to adding a tracking image, the main splogs I am familiar with remove links and images (A HREF and IMG) leaving only the text. Wouldn't this render tracking images useless?

I have been doing some FeedBurner research as well. Its not clear to me if FeedBurner does anything at all other than report 'uncommon usage'. I can't block IPs using FeedBurner, and I lose a substantial amount of control over the feed. One big splog that constantly re-uses my content gets it via FeedBurner, yet it is never indicated as an uncommon usage. I'm trying to figure out a way to deal with this issue other than by quiting FeedBurner (which provides a number of good free services).

Anyway, if nothing else I hope this plugin opens up peoples eyes to the massive connected problems of splogging, RSS, and advertising. Awareness is always the first step. Thanks for the review!

Excellent article! Too slow to react, to fast to accept. Your latest article (full vs partial feeds) will bring the adsense problems to a head. Here is my thinking: full feeds will win out as people realise that feeds that are partial have little utility.

As more and more people use full feeds, they will become aware of the plagiarisers and scrapers that steal their content and they'll contact Google. And Google will do nothing except request a DMCA fax. All the plagiariser need do is send in a counter notification and everything is back to what it was.

I was in the exact same boat as you last year. My 3 years was a couple months from ending and I knew I would start having to pay soon. I looked around in a very similar search to what you are doing and decided to go with Asmallorange because there was no discount for signing up for 3 years vs 1 month. In addition, they answered emails very promptly and had a very good reputation for the customer service. I'm still with them a year later and happy. One thing I noticed in the switch from 1&1 to Asmallorange is the speed, my site is a lot faster now. Good luck in your search.

Great find! Its too bad you have to mail or fax something in. I guess that's one way of filtering out bogus claims. Definitely bookmarked.

I just visited, they had copied a rather large part of one of one of my webpages without authorship information or attribution. This is much different than simply listing my domain information.

I ABoutus.org will argue that just like Phone Numbers, your contact info is not copyrightable. There is that famous yellow pages book case. Regardless, I don't see the benfit of having my details on Aboutus. Why would I want to be listed?

Some theorize that search engines penalize sites with large collections of outgoing links, some might say it's a sign of hostility between the blog search engines and the traditional ones, and a few go as far as to say that it's proof the blog search engines are engaging in scraper-like activity.

I can't believe that technorati or icerocket need to ensure good placement in the Google Serps. Who searches for 'blog search' or whatever. Heck, I can't even remember a time where I searched for something and a technorati or icerocket link came up.

A couple months ago now, I removed nofollow from my website and as far as I can tell I haven't been smited by the search engines.

I personally think that other websites use nofollow when linking to blogs to remove bloggers influence on the search engine results. Effectively, by using no follow we (they) are muting the blogosphere's (bleh) collective voice.

Happy anniversary! The first anniversary is supposed to be paper, so I hope someone sends you some paper soon or something!

Cheers

Feedpass is just one of many online apps that can take RSS feeds and whip them into something new. Lately, I've even seen self hosted aggregates that you can plug-in to your own site for the express aim of providing an easy way to generate new content and make $$$.

My guess is that legal troubles will take down the easy targets such as those providing this service (feedpass) but that the one-off operators will continue to fly below the radar. After all, if I found out that someone had claimed my feed and was making money off of it... in the litigious US I'd ask for damages from all parties involved.

A good read, and I agree its the mid-range blogs that are getting hit. Call it the sweet spot. Anyway, thanks again for your help!

"... it is illegal to remove copyright information affixed to a work or to provide false information before distributing it to others."

Very solid post. With reference to the above quote from your story, if someone affixes their copyright to someone else's work, they violate the DMCA right? Does this mean that if I find some random site on the web claiming something as being copyrighted by them when in fact another party owns the copyright (ug!), that the DMCA can be applied? Irregardless of the true copyright owners awareness? [Crikey this legal talk makes the english language so rigid!]

Hey, I dig the modifications you have made to the K2 theme. Nice work. And, if you are feeling generous, I wouldn't mind a newsvine invite either. cheers!