I Wonder if Yahoo! Knows About This…
Published by Toni February 17th, 2006 in Uncategorized.By now, many of you know about my encounter with Golkadeh, a blogger who was skimming off my feed and posting them on her/his blog. I also mentioned that I contacted this person indirectly, and his/her response.
Today I decided to see what the blogger has been up to since our last encounter. Did he/she put up my feeds again? What about the other “contributor” bloggers whose feeds were also being used?
Guess what- all of the other bloggers have been deleted off the “contributor” list, and so have their feed posts.
Ah, I thought. Perhaps some of the other bloggers complained as well, or perhaps this person wanted to avoid any more trouble.
So now he’s/she’s taken to posting up Yahoo! feeds.
I don’t get it. If you don’t have time to actually write for your blog, why bother having one? Just take it down.
Furthermore, I wonder if the blogger knows that after a while, Yahoo!, like many major online news outlets, takes down the news item. This means that ALL of Golkadeh’s “posts” will suddenly disappear.
Oh well. It’s not my problem. *shrug*
4 Responses to “I Wonder if Yahoo! Knows About This…”
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It makes sense to have a blog like that in the same way it makes sense to put together an internet radio station of music you like. You’re not making the music, only recommending things (maybe in a particular theme) which is syndicated by a different source.
I can understand if such a blog were set up like Boing Boing, where they provide links and information about different stories from different blogs. However, Boing Boing still has a group of writers who put in their own input about each story they feature. They don’t just put up a feed and leave it at that. If I wanted to read Yahoo! news, I’d go straight to the Yahoo! page. Why would I bother going to someone’s blog and read it there? I still don’t get the point of maintaining a blog if you’re not going to contribute anything personal to it.
Sounds like she was feedscraping — using an aggregator program to take formatted website feeds, then posting it to her own site. The reason? Simply to get keywords in order to boost Google rankings, and then try to make money by selling ads. Basically, much of the work is automated, so it’s not personal, really.
I’ve been running into more bloggers being victimized. The quick-and-dirty solution: Turn off your RSS/XML feed(s), or even just reduce them from full text to summary. A pain for your subscribers, but it’ll reduce or eliminate the plagiarists.
Do people really make a lot of money with those Adsense ads? I’ve heard that at most they only make a couple of dollars. Who clicks on those things, really?