Feeling Bitacle

Bitacle is reproducing all my posts elsewhere, apparently fed by my RSS feed, but also generating Trackback spam. I’ve found it’s also happening on other blogs. It displays a load of advertising next to the posts, so is breaching the Creative Commons license on this site. Anyone know anything about this outfit, or what to do about it?

Update: this is all over the place. Suggested solutions: an .htaccess rule that blocks their IP, use short feeds, pester google and yahoo, make sure big media owners find out their content is being ripped.

Another update: There’s another splogger republishing my content at web2.0stores.com. This one isn’t even linking back to the originals.

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22 September 2006
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5 Comments


5 Comments

Amy Gahran

22/Sep/2006

Hi, Ian

Yeah, this Bitacle splog has received a lot of attention lately. although, as far as I can tell, it’s just another splog — maybe more sophisticated and ambitious in terms of whose content, and how much content, it steals — but otherwise, just another splog.

The more I think over this splogger problem, the more I think it’s futile and even counterproductive to try to hunt down and shut down individual sploggers.

They’re not the real problem. They’re just opportunists. The REAL problem is that Google, Yahoo, and other online ad network providers have their programs set up in such a way that actively *encourages* sploggers.

It does no good to stamp out a few cockroaches. You have to stop them from breeding.

I just wrote more about this at Contentious: http://tinyurl.com/rvp7t

Thanks!

- Amy Gahran

Ian Delaney

22/Sep/2006

Thanks for the great information.

It’s where we draw the line between aggregators and splogs, I guess – I publish a full text feed because I think it’s the right thing to do. But I don’t want someone else to make money out of my content without my permission. The CC license is there for a reason. It’s also on my feed via feedburner.

Good point that the advertising networks ought to be thinking a lot more about the value they are delivering to both publishers and advertisers.

Amy Gahran

22/Sep/2006

“the advertising networks ought to be thinking a lot more about the value they are delivering to both publishers and advertisers.”

Google and Yahoo especially should be mindful of how their encouragement of splogs directly undermines the usefulness of their own search engines.

Also, I guess if you’re getting a link back from a splog and that makes you happy, then that’s your business. Personally, Id have a problem with that, but to each their own.

- Amy Gahran

Ian Delaney

22/Sep/2006

As I said, it breaches the Creative Commons license I have put on this site. So, yes, I do have a problem.

Any idea how to proceed?

Billy The Blogging Poet

23/Sep/2006

Ian,
Rather than repeat myself on a hundred different blogs I updated my post where you left your comments with links to a way to deal with scrapers I’ve used successfully many times. That said: unless you set your RSS feeds to short you are doomed to repeat this same thing on a pretty regular basis– like it or not.


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