Death to Human Content Aggregators
Copying other people’s blogs, and posting the content on your own blog, does not make you an authority on a given subject. In fact, you shouldn’t even consider yourself a blogger.
If you’re a chronic Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V kind of guy, there’s a good chance you think I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth. After all, you’re kind enough to attribute the story to the blogger. Or, if you’re super generous,you’ll only copy half of a story, sending people to my blog to read the rest.
If my wife cooks dinner, and I move the steak from the stove to my plate, it doesn’t give me the right to claim myself an Iron Chef. Even if I add salt.
Imagine if you will, that Pepsi decided to sell Coke. Oh, it’s in a Pepsi can, just filled to the brim with Coke. If you look closely at the bottom of the can it tells you that it’s Coke inside.
One more comparison for these blog leechers.
Here in New York, how would the New York Times feel if the Daily News started to publish their stories – without permission – in there entirely. Even with proper attribution, it’s illegal and would never fly.
Tell me why we give these so-called self-proclaimed bloggers, who are nothing more than human content aggregators, the license to steal. The Internet might be the Wild Wild West, with enforcement impractical. However, I urge you, dear readers, to take the law into your own hands. Do not give these copy and pasters your business. Just go to Google and research the topic you’re interested. Cause at the end of the day, that’s all these bloggin’ wannabes are doing.
If you’re going to take the bulk of my post, I don’t want your click-throughs. I hope other authentic bloggers agree.
It’s called creativity. Go find some.
[...] recently blogged about my disdain for so-called ‘bloggers’ who rip and run with your content. You know the drill. You stay up late researching and writing a post, only to [...]
Blogging vs. Human Content Aggregators : The Blog Herald said this on March 30, 2008 8:57 pm
I read your rants here and on the Blog Herald. At first, I wanted to chide you. Are you living in the past? Gripe all you want about casual scraping. People will do it, even if confronted publicly about their thievery. Many sued by RIAA probably found untraceable ways to steal music afterwards.
Then I may have grasped a solution. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other major players can agree on a standard whereby authors submit content to search engines before making it public online. Submitted content is tagged for time and author, but not made listed in SERPs until made public on site and crawlable to search engine spiders. The author is notified immediately that content has been tagged. Then the author can display content publicly with greater assurance that scrapers will not be indexed favorably by search engines.
Time and author tags provide search engines in-house tracking that could be used to determine authenticity after content is indexed. Obviously, if you submit your content before making it public for indexing, then you probably are the author. Page rank and relevancy could be pegged to authenticity. Duplicate (scraped) content could be spotted immediately and ignored or penalized without jeopardizing the original’s SERPs.
Those who submit content must have Google, Yahoo, MSN accounts, etc. (This would make it an easier sell to search engines.) All older content is grandfathered. In other words, content already indexed cannot be resubmitted for authentic tags. So I cannot submit my site’s present poems for tags, only new poems. Someone could steal another’s content, such as one of my handwritten poems, before the author submits it to search engines for tagging. In that case, the author could file a DMCA takedown notice and go to court if necessary, just like we have to do now.
How do author and search engine reconcile authentic tag to content location (URL) before content is made public? The author must tell the search engine at what URL the content will appear, although the content will not appear at that URL until a future date.
What if author wants to move content from one URL to another? The author could log into his or her account and change the authentic tag’s URL information. This probably would be the most difficult problem this idea faces. Web sites go dark, and the author uploads old content elsewhere at a later date, etc.
What if author loses and cannot obtain again his or her login information? In the short term, I am not sure. In the long term, defunct accounts could have submitted content untagged after, say, a year has passed with no account activity. This would not negate copyright protection, but search engines need to clean house from time to time.
I think authentic tagging would work much better than the ragtag system we have now. Will bloggers still copy and paste? Will scrapers still scrape? Yes, but your original content would be ranked more favorably than theirs if tagged. Their “content” might be ignored altogether. What do you think?
Michael said this on March 31, 2008 7:32 am