This blog seems to be stealing other people’s original content and republishing it, making it look like the author is writing for the site. Example: Original — Copy. This is the first time I’ve used nofollow in an entry. Update: In the comments Dan says he gave permission, so I apoligize, but it did look really fishy.
Hmm… though the reported “author” of that “copy” post that you made has a personal homepage of Dan’s Simplebits.
I could be wrong and Dan could have signed up on this site to syndicate his full content to reach a wider audience than he currently does, but it seems fishy.
Would they even need anyone to register to grab their feed? I mean it is basically an online feed aggregator.
It would be a different thing if they were just showing the title of the post then linking to the original, but you don’t really even realize it is from another site until you see the postback at the bottom.
There’s an interesting line between this and planet style sites. I’ve found myself syndicated in places I wasn’t aware of but I’ve never been upset about it. The Creative Commons license I use (not sure if Dan had his content licensed under CC) grants certain syndication rights and I don’t believe this bigblog site would be violating them. Dan is a member there and the content is attributed:
http://greatbigblog.com/profile/29/Dan.html
Still, when this is and isn’t acceptable is an interesting question…
Dan may not necessarily have registered himself on that site. I have a site that re-publishes articles from syndication, and it originally was written so that it automagically created a user entry for the articles. I later modified it to just use a single user for all articles.
The main difference is that on my War on Spam site I try to make it a little more clear that the content is not original, but is repurposed. First of all, the beginning of each post has a link to the original source, and the content that it posts is a blockquoted excerpt.
GreatBigBlog doesn’t make the provenance of its content quite so visible. And there’s no mention in their FAQ about “postback”.
Section 5 of their FAQ seems to abdicate any responsiblity if someone signs up a feed that is not their own.
If they had the “Postback” someplace more prominent it would be much better, right now its just kinda hidden at the bottom.
I do actually like their design though.
I did, indeed grant permission for the site to use my feed. I hadn’t checked on how they were using it — in fact, I didn’t realize my Atom feed contained full posts until now 🙂 Something that I don’t like about sites that republish content though: offering their own comments. Especially if I have comments enabled on the same post on my site. Now there’s potentially two conversations going on about the same post. Hadn’t thought about that when I granted permission though.
Thanks for clearing that up, Dan.
Matt has also mentioned before that allowing comments on republished content confuses things.
I need to configure my WoS blog to disable comments on “outsourced” articles, I suppose.
Dan Cederholm, along with many others, have given us full permission to publish their blog. We currently syndicate close to 25 blogs, and each one has granted us permission prior to us syndicating. We handpick blogs, e-mail them, and upon their approval, we start aggregating. We also have the postback link right to the original writers’ site to give full credit, and that’s a clean link (it doesn’t use “no follow” or anything) straight to them. We specifically made sure to credit all writers. We even e-mail for permission to blogs who are licensed under variants of the Creative Commons license. We would never steal content.
Great Big Blog is based on the principle that we get others’ content in order to allow readers easy reach and access to their blogs. The model only works if we aggregate other blogs. We intended this to feed traffic to blogs (even largely-read blogs like Dan’s). I personally read through the posts at Great Big Blog every day, not just to moderate, but to read them. When I want to post a comment, I click the postback link and add the comment to their site.
Dan — As you should recall, one of our staff members (Cory) has been in contact with you before. If you would like us to disable comments on posts that you make, we would be more than happy to, just drop him an e-mail and we’ll take care of it. We also apologize if you had not intended to give us your full articles – we’d be more than happy to just syndicate snippets as well.
Agreed about the comments. I hate it when someone grabs a big excerpt from one of my posts and all the commenting happens there. Sometimes there will be many dozen comments elsewhere, but none on my entry.
Also, it would be nice if that site would mention the Postback at the TOP of the article as well.
You’ve got to be kidding me. This is part of blogging. If you read the ABOUT, they clearly state thier goals. Frankly, this type of blogbitching is not a surprise from a site like this.
A WordPress site that does copy without permission from RSS is Enless ruminations. There’s no contact for the owner. I wrote the host without any luck. They do put it in a blockquote and link at the bottom, but they are spamming search engines with no original content.
Sites like these are going to make me go back to just headlines… I can’t take the risk of search engines penalizing me for duplicate content… When it’s MY content.
Darryl — If you’re referring to #5 of “Special Features” (“Add an RSS Feed”), we really don’t have any idea whether people added their own feed or other people’s. It’s impossible to tell the integrity, and therefore we simply have a policy that we will remove feeds upon a quick request from the true owner. That said, so far all the feeds we are syndicating we have contacted, so we know for sure that we aren’t syndicating anything that we shouldn’t be.
Also, we do have unique content that the staff writes. Unique content is currently the minority, but we do try and keep up on it so that it’s more than just other people’s content.
We are currently discussing whether we should move the postback link, and whether we should turn comments off for syndicated posts. Chances are we’ll disable comments on syndicated posts on a per-feed basis.
I don’t get people like that. It’s like they think they’ll never get caught. And really not only is it totally lazy, but it just makes them look incredibly stupid in the end. What’s the point? Aside from getting praise for work they didn’t do…I guess I just answered my own retorical question, still it’s incredibly pointless.
Are you all not reading what Nathan is writing?! He runs the site, I would think that he knows what he’s talking about…
I had some of my photography content ripped off by a free blog on blogspot.com – they used almost the exact same wording, removed links to the sites I linked to and replaced them with links back to their own affiliate sites, never linked to my blog (although once mentioned my name, sans link) and then had the cheek to post a trackback back to my blog!
I’d point you at the offending material but I don’t want to give them any more exposure, and besides, I deleted the comments with great satisfaction!
Donncha.