There is no concrete way of preventing that from happening. If someone wants to copy 'this' post, that person will still do it and remove the stuff at the end of the post.
Search experience is getting poluted with all the blog postings. Blogs should be excluded from the normal search and should be kept separate. There is too much junk out there!
Jason Hawryluk
· 3 years ago
Yup, that curve ball has been moving towards home plate for some time now. However don’t be fooled. It’s top of the ninth bases loaded. Google abuser who has stepped up to the plate, now has a count of 2s-0b. I see that a lot no attribution for posts etc… Proverbial reality is going to one day hit the fan.
Jason Hawryluk
· 3 years ago
Dileepa P, agree completely except for the separation.
The search engines are really falling short, and it'll get much worse. The semantics of the internet search algorithms that worked fine yesterday are no longer apt to the task.
Isn't copying the post an infringement of copyright?
James Prudente
· 3 years ago
I think we just witnessed the first Scoble microchunk.
Jeremy Wright
· 3 years ago
Most networks have no intent of "locking out" the others. In fact, I'm sure WIN (the company in this case) doesn't either. There is no directive on our network to "source internal blogs first". In fact, I'd rather bloggers sourced other blogs first, as it extends the conversation.
Then again, I read it knowing that it did come from the scobleizer, so attribution was still kept.
And I agree it's a problem.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
Jeremy: WIN isn't the network I was thinking of in this case, although it was the convenient example. SEO's are hiring networks of "authoritative" bloggers to link to their stuff. That locks everyone else out.
James Kendrick
· 3 years ago
Sourcing of blog posts has always been a thorny issue but the main point of the example that you linked to (mine in this case) was to carry it so far to change published posts with proper attribution to replace it with an internal source. That is just plain wrong.
/pd
· 3 years ago
Robert - whicxh seo ?? If a-listers are being "paid" to link to their "stuff". We would like to know whom your concerns are about ??
We have discovered white page txt/doorway methods and commented on various forums. Yup bmw.de was one of them and then all the other a-listers picked up the chatter ands began blogging about it !!
So I am not sure extactly what you concern is or are stating some thing that we don't about (yet !)
Could you be a littler clearer with a concrete e.g ?
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
/pd: I didn't say "a listers."
I said "authoritative." It's real easy to be authoritative and still be on the "Z list."
Innocent Bystander
· 3 years ago
I'm not particularly surprised by this development. This happened with print media (Hearst, Knight-Ridder) and broadcast media. Blogging is just another medium.
The advantage is that we should be able to "out" plagarism and similar tactics because consolidation is harder on the internet and (to quote DWiner) - these things can simply be exposed and then routed around.
scobleizer
· 3 years ago
/pd: no. I don't want to give these guys any publicity. Why? Cause even if 1% of my readership would sell their souls, that's still a lot of people and I don't want to help these guys out.
matt maier
· 3 years ago
Uhm, "remove blog posts from search engines...", what? How about if the engines build better algorithms that can effectively deal with blogs and how they work (or don't work as the case may be.)
Removing the content of blogs is looking backward not forward. It would be a retreat to "safe" ground, ineffectual and obsolete the usefulness of search engines. Metrics for relevance that are not as heavily skewed towards counting will eliminate the ability of such "lockouts" and content pollution.
Apply heat to the content locators not the content producers.
Scott McNulty
· 3 years ago
Since I am the lead blogger on TUAW, I thought I would chime in. No one WIN has EVER told me to link network blogs before outside blogs. We post like crazy about Apple stuff and every once and awhile we link to Engadget or Hack A Day, but it isn't like we are a link farm for other WIN blogs.
With that said, I am in talks with the blogger who posted the bit about the iTablet to see what's what.
btwohig
· 3 years ago
Blogsearch is going to change the world because of its powerful network effects. I do believe there are ways and I have concepts to get around these things, but no one has really presented the solution yet, atleast to me.
Jesse J. Anderson
· 3 years ago
I agree with matt, we don't want to take a step back and retreat to what we think is safe. Teh search engines need to step up to the plate and start dealing with this issue so the general public doesn't have to think or even worry about it.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
Umm groupthink echo-chamber linking, stealing content, blog spammers, Ad Sense scammers, you just now realizing this? Knock, knock, anyone home? But whatever they been slipping into your water at that Conference, drink more of it. I like this "new" Robert Scoble. Funny thing, when The Register, Nick Carr, JCD and everyone else said this way back when, you pissed on them for being jealous, just wanting traffic and "not getting blogs". But you do come around, 2 years later.
Jeremy Wright
· 3 years ago
Scoble, your title, and the first phrase of your post, imply that many "networks" are doing this. Saying "blog networks are doing this" and saying "some people are starting to pull together bloggers to do this" are two very different things.
Kind of like the difference between "Microsoft is anticompetitive and squashes the competition" and "in the past, Microsoft hasn't always had its competitors best interests at heart".
Y'know that "if 1% of my readership" bit? Well, how about if 1% of your readers start thinking that blog networks are just around to incestuously link, create link farms, game search engines and abuse users? ;-)
I know that's not what you mean, and I know it wouldn't happen, but considering your rant earlier about the importance of titles...
anon
· 3 years ago
Bullsh*t. Don't publish your stuff in a public medium then.
James Kendrick
· 3 years ago
I have been contacted by the blogger who ran the TUAW post that started this. She has assured me that the post never attributed to my article and thus was never changed. I have no reason to doubt her, I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt until it is proven that that attitude is a mistake.
At this point it appears that either Blogniscient or Technorati generated the error as part of the search results. This is scary enough but I've never seen this happen before.
I am going to return to blogging about mobile tech, which is the purpose of my blog.
PeteCashmore
· 3 years ago
As far as I'm concerned, the best way to defend yourself from sploggers is microchunking - you can't prevent an RSS feed from getting syndicated to the "wrong" places, so you might as well embed the attribution (or maybe an ad) within the feed itself. I wrote about this microchunked solution back in December:
I'm not sure if there's a 100% foolproof way to make this work - after all, links and ads can be stripped out by really determined sploggers. And when you start putting attribution and/or ads in your feed, you've got to be careful not to annoy your readers. Either way, you can't prevent your feed from being republished, so you either need to accept it or turn it to your advantage with microchunking.
Kent's Imperative
· 3 years ago
Every ecology breeds parasites. Pack behavior and "lock out" of non-pack memebers is just another adapation and survival strategy in the real world... to see it in the Parallel World is not surprising.
However, this is certainly not a "good thing"... to the extent that spam blogs, link farms, clickfraud, and the like pollute the information environment it reduces the "dietary content" of hardcore infovores like yourself and the rest of us.
The race of tool and technique for better, more efficent hunting / gathering of our information diet is unfortunately not without competitive pressures. As much as I do not like that fact, it is what it is.
For further regarding biological models for Internet activities and their utility for analysis, please take a look at
Hi, I'm the person that posted the supposedly non-attributed (plagiarized?) post. I'm fairly sure that by reading my posts on tuaw/hackaday/engadget you will see that i link back to the original source every single time. This particular ebay auction for the post was sent to me via email in the hackaday tip line and I had no idea that JK of jkontherun.com had a post about the same auction. I didn't tamper with the post nor would I!
People who know me know that I am the sort of girl who stands up for free speech, open-ness of information, good linkbacks (good finds get "stolen"/non-attributed from hackaday often, btw). I run three OS'es, many types of hardware, and love to get to the bottom of a tech mystery. Read my stuff (and other stuff from weblogs inc blogs), you'll see I post [via] and direct links (sometimes more than once in a post!).
I saw the comment by James but didn't realise he was the author of the first post you linked to. Here's the follow-up on his blog: http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2006/02/... (conclusion being it's more likely to be a Blogniscient or Technorati glitch).
Which does raise the question: the situation is theoretically possible (and nasty) -- do we have examples in the wild of this happening? (besides the "blog networks do this all the time"?)
BTW, one way of settling things (or at least, an interesting thing to do) would have been to check referrer stats for the initial post. On the server.
Phil Sim
· 3 years ago
But Robert you've argued very heavily in favour of full RSS feeds as opposed to partial feeds which would pretty much prevent this from happening. I don't see that it's possible that you can argue that your content should be republishable in an RSS reader but not on a SPLOG site...
hugh macleod
· 3 years ago
A blog's value comes from its authority. By closing up your network, your authority (and value) withers on the vine.
The good news is, the blogosphere is remarkably self-correcting.
Mads Kristensen
· 3 years ago
I agree with Phil. If you give in and don't produce full rss feeds, you accept your defeat.
Steph
· 3 years ago
Phil, Mads: for me, the problem with finding my content on splogs is intent. Are they reproducing my content to make money out of it? Not good. In a feedreader, the software is reproducing my content at the request of a reader so he can have more convenient access to my content. In one situation, my content is a means. In the other, it's the end.
Aaron Pratt
· 3 years ago
I asked David Naylor this week about Google and duplicate content, it appears that if whomever is duplicating your content has more authority and trust in Google they often take full credit for everything that you write. You have major authority Mr. Scoble so you do not have to worry as much about getting ripped off as us "weenies" do. When you see your content as "supplemental" in Google than you have a concrete example that the engine is failing you. It is believed that MSN is the best at filtering out copycats and finding the content originator. Pretty interesting eh?
Matt Cutts at his blog officially confirms that SEO company Traffic Power and domains promoted by them have been removed from Google’s index due to SEO techniques violating Google’s webmaster guidelines.
what about such techniques which are used by those who actually index and control the flow of information into and out of blogsphere ??
There is a much richer dimension of 'gatekeeper' type attitude within the major players too.. !!
Ryan B
· 3 years ago
That is pretty lame, one way that it could be done would be just posting a picture of content, like wikipedia does for sections of pages that contain mathematical equations.
Brian H
· 3 years ago
I went through a similar experience. I was working as the About.com Desktop Video "guide" when a loyal reader had found this site called desktop-video-guide.com that had copied all of my content word for word.
I began populating my articles with pictures that had my name on it for the amusement of seeing it on another site 2 weeks later with no attribution, and so I could prove my case. Then I made a formal complaint to my editor at About.com thinking I had all the right steps covered to make it simple to see that someone was plagiarizing my work... He said "it's some guy in Singapore, so you're outta luck. Our laws don't apply there."
The worse part of the story is that PC World did a "best 50 websites" back in 02 that listed their site. They did mention it looked similar to mine, which was at least something. But the give an "award" or at least the title, editors should do a little more than a couple clicks of research or they are no better than the losers who copy other people's writing.
Mike May
· 3 years ago
Agreed. I wrote about the same thing and outlined a (feasible?) scenario of how the rise of "Reputation Brokers" might play out. Would love thoughts and feedback from anyone here.
Jake
· 3 years ago
People are corruptable. People are corrupt. As soon as you keep score, the egos kick in. Reputation Brokers become broken with the stink of corruption. Google Juice becomes a currency. Links become a currency. The circle jerk continues.
Chrono Cr@cker
· 3 years ago
Well, Blogging does give others the freedom to take a couple of lines from your post to theirs but ofcourse they are obliged to give a link back. That way both benefit.
Chris Heuer
· 3 years ago
Unfortunately, this is more evidence of the need for a closed system of some kind to ensure the source of an article and the reputation of the individuals within it. I thought we might do a Better Bloggers Bureau or something like that to validate the source of the blogs and to keep out the others. Perhaps a piece of code that could go on a blog that validates its 'trustworthiness'. The problem with this is that there is very little room for anonymity in such a system.
CetaMac
· 3 years ago
it's really? just a reduced personal site. I think trend for personal pubishing is going be simpler and simpler.
Honor Gunday
· 3 years ago
When we were kids (back in 1990s), we had taken over a portion of the Turkish Internet traffic with my friends by creating a "deep" Internet website network and each of our sites' hits had skyrocketed and remained that way for many years. A user who landed on an mp3 site was shown links for a music forum, where links to another friend's mp3 player review site was shown etc.. etc..So users jumped from one site to the other and never really left the network.
Now that the Internet is more widespread and there are many more points of entry (especially search engines), it is much harder to do the same. But it seems like smaller clusters are forming as you mention. I'd say similar clusters also exist among porn sites, music and hacking sites where once you land on you get thrown, lead, or persuaded to go to another "networked" site. so this is not really new. But I guess since blogs are meant to bring more democracy to the Internet, maybe the concern should be over the dominance of the most networked and not the clusters being formed.
All Comments
Search experience is getting poluted with all the blog postings. Blogs should be excluded from the normal search and should be kept separate. There is too much junk out there!
The search engines are really falling short, and it'll get much worse. The semantics of the internet search algorithms that worked fine yesterday are no longer apt to the task.
Isn't copying the post an infringement of copyright?
Then again, I read it knowing that it did come from the scobleizer, so attribution was still kept.
And I agree it's a problem.
We have discovered white page txt/doorway methods and commented on various forums. Yup bmw.de was one of them and then all the other a-listers picked up the chatter ands began blogging about it !!
So I am not sure extactly what you concern is or are stating some thing that we don't about (yet !)
Could you be a littler clearer with a concrete e.g ?
I said "authoritative." It's real easy to be authoritative and still be on the "Z list."
The advantage is that we should be able to "out" plagarism and similar tactics because consolidation is harder on the internet and (to quote DWiner) - these things can simply be exposed and then routed around.
engines build better algorithms that can effectively deal with blogs and how they work (or don't work as the case may be.)
Removing the content of blogs is looking backward not forward. It would be a retreat to "safe" ground, ineffectual and obsolete the usefulness of search engines. Metrics for relevance that are not as heavily skewed towards counting will eliminate the ability of such "lockouts" and content pollution.
Apply heat to the content locators not the content producers.
With that said, I am in talks with the blogger who posted the bit about the iTablet to see what's what.
Kind of like the difference between "Microsoft is anticompetitive and squashes the competition" and "in the past, Microsoft hasn't always had its competitors best interests at heart".
Y'know that "if 1% of my readership" bit? Well, how about if 1% of your readers start thinking that blog networks are just around to incestuously link, create link farms, game search engines and abuse users? ;-)
I know that's not what you mean, and I know it wouldn't happen, but considering your rant earlier about the importance of titles...
At this point it appears that either Blogniscient or Technorati generated the error as part of the search results. This is scary enough but I've never seen this happen before.
I am going to return to blogging about mobile tech, which is the purpose of my blog.
http://mashable.com/2005/12/31/why-online-media...
I'm not sure if there's a 100% foolproof way to make this work - after all, links and ads can be stripped out by really determined sploggers. And when you start putting attribution and/or ads in your feed, you've got to be careful not to annoy your readers. Either way, you can't prevent your feed from being republished, so you either need to accept it or turn it to your advantage with microchunking.
However, this is certainly not a "good thing"... to the extent that spam blogs, link farms, clickfraud, and the like pollute the information environment it reduces the "dietary content" of hardcore infovores like yourself and the rest of us.
The race of tool and technique for better, more efficent hunting / gathering of our information diet is unfortunately not without competitive pressures. As much as I do not like that fact, it is what it is.
For further regarding biological models for Internet activities and their utility for analysis, please take a look at
http://kentsimperative.blogspot.com/2006/02/nam...
People who know me know that I am the sort of girl who stands up for free speech, open-ness of information, good linkbacks (good finds get "stolen"/non-attributed from hackaday often, btw). I run three OS'es, many types of hardware, and love to get to the bottom of a tech mystery. Read my stuff (and other stuff from weblogs inc blogs), you'll see I post [via] and direct links (sometimes more than once in a post!).
Cheers,
fbz
aka Fabienne Serriere
tuaw/hackaday/engadget
Which does raise the question: the situation is theoretically possible (and nasty) -- do we have examples in the wild of this happening? (besides the "blog networks do this all the time"?)
BTW, one way of settling things (or at least, an interesting thing to do) would have been to check referrer stats for the initial post. On the server.
The good news is, the blogosphere is remarkably self-correcting.
Here is the post, do a search in the Google to see all those taking credit for it: http://www.seobuzzbox.com/duplicate-content-goo...
Aaron Pratt
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/confirming-a-pena...
what about such techniques which are used by those who actually index and control the flow of information into and out of blogsphere ??
There is a much richer dimension of 'gatekeeper' type attitude within the major players too.. !!
I began populating my articles with pictures that had my name on it for the amusement of seeing it on another site 2 weeks later with no attribution, and so I could prove my case. Then I made a formal complaint to my editor at About.com thinking I had all the right steps covered to make it simple to see that someone was plagiarizing my work... He said "it's some guy in Singapore, so you're outta luck. Our laws don't apply there."
The worse part of the story is that PC World did a "best 50 websites" back in 02 that listed their site. They did mention it looked similar to mine, which was at least something. But the give an "award" or at least the title, editors should do a little more than a couple clicks of research or they are no better than the losers who copy other people's writing.
Now that the Internet is more widespread and there are many more points of entry (especially search engines), it is much harder to do the same. But it seems like smaller clusters are forming as you mention. I'd say similar clusters also exist among porn sites, music and hacking sites where once you land on you get thrown, lead, or persuaded to go to another "networked" site. so this is not really new. But I guess since blogs are meant to bring more democracy to the Internet, maybe the concern should be over the dominance of the most networked and not the clusters being formed.