Here’s one from the “it doesn’t happen often, but…” file…
Call them what you want, “spam blogs”, “link blogs”, whatever. You’ve all seen the sites I’m talking about that contain no content other than a crapload of advertising, plus links to legitimate articles on other blogs that all focus on a specific subject-matter. Some are worse than others, but most that I’ve seen contain a blurb or summary of the legitimate article and a link to the legitimate site. Think of a Google Alert email with advertising.
Now, content theft is a real problem (and illegal, let’s not forget), and often in ways even more offensive than the “splog” scenario I’ve just described. If you’d like to know more about it and get some good information about what you can do when it happens to you, then I’d suggest you start here: Atheist Revolution: Blogging Tip #11: Combatting Plagiarism.
This is really the only type of content theft I’ve faced (yet). And for me, it really just comes down to this: if I wanted to try to make some money off my original content, well… first I’d probably try to be a better writer and put some real thought into the content as opposed to just banging it out more-or-less contemporaneously (hell, even I admit that my content is of “questionable value”, if you’ve ever noticed by blog’s tagline, hehe!), but then, I’d put some sort of advertising on this blog. See my point? If I wanted anyone making money off my content, I would want that person to be me. Golly gee-whiz, call me reactionary, but I get little pissed when I see someone else trying to make money based on my original content.
Anyway, I did get a bit of a kick out of this (link to Flickr).
But even so, now that I take another look at the capture, I see that that the splog has filtered the copyright symbol and replaced it with a question mark, which gives, or attempts to give — intentionally, I might add — a different meaning. Here’s what the post should look like — this is the same post viewed in Google Reader (link to Flickr).
One Comment
That is very funny! Thank you for sharing. Us anti-scrapers love these kinds of stories.