DISQUS

I'm delighted to have found this blog. You right on to call out Google on this usurping of Open Social name. I hate to say it but I have grown very weary of Google's business practices as of late. I hope these are just mistakes of a young company that's having trouble dealing with their enormous success, but every day I these "mistakes" seem more premeditated and disregarding... surely someone attorney at Google would have spoken up that they just can't take someone else's name... right? Or what, or perhaps some attorney did speak up, only to say "yeah, let's just take it, we're Google, we can do whatever we want".

Careful Google, you can't keep this up forever.

This is a tough issue to deal with. I just started a blog recently about web development and it wasn't more than week when I noticed someone was scraping my content. At least they referenced me with a link, I guess a type of "thanks for letting reuse your content without permission". The problem I have is I'm now nervous as to whether Google could penalize my blog for being web scraped. That perhaps they mistaken this guy's blog for a doorway website, as in something I'm using to artificially inflate our numbers. I also noticed that we were recently dropped from certain pertinent keywords by AOL/MSN Live search recently and I'm wondering if this is related.

This has been a problem for a while regarding these search engines. It's really hard to identify who's legit and who's being scraped, from who's scraping themselves, or offering RSS feeds for the taking for the link backs.

It's a HUGE problem that I don't see Google doing anything about and it has to make you wonder how long until enough folks are screwed by this mess before it hits the news.

Let's face, identifying who's who is damn near impossible, so why would Google waste time fielding thousands of calls/complaints from small time bloggers and websites? They only care about the big guys, and those are easy to identify by now.

I'm gong to continue my writing, but I fear that the "good times" are coming to end in regards to self-publishing. Social Networking is too hot to ignore and blogging is going to be trumped by video blogging if it hasn't already.

Not a fun situation to deal with at all.

Ernesto Gluecksmann

WordPress is the correct trademark... funny however, that the WordPress program itself natively installs itself in a /wordpress/ directory and not /WordPress/ which it could have easily done.

WP, wordpress, Wordpress, are fine. Yes, they may run a foul by the more persnickety types, but they're all pretty common usage.

For example, it's called a "BlackBerry", technically. However, most people commonly use "Blackberry" and even there, if you're referring to the platform, you should probably be using "Research In Motion", but if you use that, you're likely to lose most non-tech types (most business users of their beloved "BBs") because they mostly think of them as simply, Blackberries (or is it BlackBerrys? #^@$). But I digress...

Let us not forget that these funky trademarks like WordPress are not exactly proper nouns.. anyway. So if someone's "mistakenly" uses Wordpress instead of the trademark, you have to give some leeway. And most certainly, I'm not fan of being influenced by anyone's marketing department... with the exception of WordPress, because they're the greatest blogging software in the world and I don't think they have a marketing department. WordPress it is.

Keith, please get in touch. I'm interested in discussing your news aggregation tool for one of my sites. Thanks! BTW, I clicked on your "Keith" name and the about Keith page doesn't seem to be working (thus this post in your comments.)

-E