Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Splogger update

There is nothing like pointing out an apparent injustice to the rest of the internet community and then seeing quick results.

A post over the weekend about E-Travel News, which has been duplicating our content, generated some interesting responses, with offers of advice pouring in and one reader actually reporting the site to Google.

A strongly worded email to the site's administrator yesterday yielded an immediate response.

E-Travel News has changed its "scripting" to stop the RSS feed automatically populating the site's homepage with pour blog posts. The existing duplicated content will be removed within the next 28 days.

While it was highly amusing to see a Travolution Blog post on the E-Travel News homepage with headline criticising the site, content duplicatipon is a serious issue.

Our thanks to those who offered tips with how to combat the problem.

This is probably the most thorough and useful explanation:

What to do when someone steals your content via the Lorelle on Wordpress blog.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well done Kev

Anonymous said...

Kevin

RSS 2.0 supports a copyright element within the XML standard. It also supports creative commons policies through a well supported RSS extension.

With neither, you are not giving very clear (systematic) guidance regarding what someones rights are with your content that you have chosen to syndicate via RSS.

Therefore someone could assume that they can use your content without explicit permission (implicit permission having been granted by yourselves at the point of deciding to syndicate publicly)

If you put a copyright in your RSS as an XML element, and a creative commons policy that says no commercial reuse (but personal use is fine), then yes you can "name and shame"!

Splogs are not right but how you have currently setup your RSS they are not fully in the wrong either.

I would also redirect your feeds via a system like feedburner. They can alert you to unusual uses (such as splogs).

Sorry for being difficult

:)

Alex
TourCMS