Comments on: Pro Splogs - What You Don’t Know about Blog Spam

By: Zander Erasmus | Student Advice Blog

Zander Erasmus | Student Advice Blog — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:55:29 +0000

yes, all this is unfortunately a very big problem… i’m pretty much just starting seriously blogging and it’s a concern for me that the things I say might just pop up on a more popular website and people will take the information as their’s =/

Zander Erasmus | Student Advice Blog’s last blog post..Student iPhone Commercial

By: Definition of a Pro Blogger - Setting the Record Straight | Blog Tips Tools News - Blog Bloke dot com

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:21:03 +0000

[…] reading: Pro Splogs: What You Didn’t Know about Blog Spam * Author’s Note: Although I try my best I might have missed something or not explained it in the […]

By: Blog Bloke

Blog Bloke — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:48:29 +0000

Yes, it can be a double-edged sword. But to tell you the truth it’s the bloggers who alter the words a little that tick me off the most. The are the sneakiest and I can think of many competitors who do it and some are even a-listers making a very nice living scraping the internet. They can be the worst offenders for stealing intellectual property and not divulging their sources. At the least the ones who scrape our posts verbatim provide a link.

By: Kathy

Kathy — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:14:17 +0000

I was scraped once very early on. I didn’t know if what the guy was doing was legal (he took 100% of my content with a citation to me), so I posted the question to the BlogCatalog Writer’s group. As luck would have it, an attorney/journalist was in the group and responded that it was indeed copyright infringement. It happens also that the scraper stumbled onto the discussion and a heated argument ensued for about a week. He contested that US copyright didn’t apply to him, since he lived in another country, and that since he gave me a citation, it didn’t apply to him. In the end, he backed down and took me off his scraping list and then ultimately took his whole site down.

I know some bloggers might welcome the kind of exposure I was getting from his site, no matter how he got my content. But I didn’t feel that way. It bothered me to see my entire content on someone else’s site, citation or not. I didn’t consider it flattery. I considered it theft.

By: Blog Bloke

Blog Bloke — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:56:43 +0000

Sorry for not getting back sooner but I’ve temporarily put comments on moderation. When I write a post like this the trolls like to crawl out from the cracks and attack me.

Lee, I know what you mean and I have the same policy. However, I’ve been approached recently by a reputable major magazine to put ads on this site. I’m struggling with the issue and I’ll keep you posted.

Hi Astroprof. Unfortunately there’s not a lot we can do except to moderate comments, use plugins like Akismet or something similar, and CAPTCHA for Blogger users.

One thing that I like to do is whenever I find a site scraping my material I expose them with a “nofollow” link. It’s a shame but as long as there are parasites looking to exploit technology (and there always will be) there’s not a whole lot more we can do about it except to expose them for the frauds that they are.

By: Astroprof

Astroprof — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:41:38 +0000

As my site has gained popularity, I have been besieged with spam of all types. I have had to add several layers of blocking. Something needs to be done. Spam now accounts for a VERY large percentage of internet traffic. It is takes away much of the usefulness of the features (comments, email, trackbacks, etc) that we like to use.

By: Lee

Lee — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 19:34:33 +0000

I have begun to avoid blogs that have ads or any kind of commercial content like the plague. Like you said, many of them are manipulating the system to earn money off of content that is either stolen from someone else, or is just garbage.