(Updated)
I hate plagiarism… content theft … whatever we call it. But it’s a fact of life, better get used to it. Somehow when I see my content replicated in stupid auto-fed aggregation blogs, that are visibly, obviously auto-fed ad-sites, it doesn’t bother me as much as seeing stolen content on what may otherwise appear a normally edited blog.

Like I said, there is not much I can do about it, but I decided to “out them” from time to time, as I see them. Here’s one for today: Wetpaint Launches: Wikis Evolve by Luna Tech. (no link love to this one, I am using nofollow). Compare it to the original at TechCrunch. identical copies, without any attribution to Mike Arrington. Theft. As a matter of fact, not a very intelligent one: the links and comments point back to Techcrunch.

Now, I feel better. If all my readers publish a few thieves once in a while, perhaps some of them will give up – not the bots, just the humans.

Update (6/20): Robert claims (see comment below) that he was testing WordPress, and wasn’t aware the content could be publicly seen (?).  Let’s give him the benefit of doubt, especially since he deleted the offending post.  Case settled.  I will still continue to expose similar cases from time to time, and I hope some of you will join me.

Technorati : blogging, blogs, content theft, feeds, plagiarism, rss, techcrunch, wetpaint

Naive me … I thought spammers would prefer to call themselves marketers, and would generally stay away from using the term “spam”. Oh, boy, how wrong I am. Some are actually proud of being spammers.

After analyzing a site that in the first 18 days of existence, got 5 billion (yes, that’s a “b”, is that even possible?) pages indexed by Google, Alex, a “SEO bloguru” lays out the easy steps how everyone else can do it. The last two steps in his recipe: (I’m using nofollow, no link love to spammers)

• “Launch your blog comment spam attack. Link to some of your subdomains which are also interlinked.

• Wait a few weeks… then sit back and enjoy your billions of indexed pages. Be sure to put 3 Adsense or YPN blocks on each page.”

Censorship is bad … yet I am really unhappy to see this on Techmeme. Makes me wish there was a “nuke it” button to keep spam away.

Others on the subject:

• Geek News Central
• Rough Type
• Web Metrics Guru (I’m glad it does not work for everyone...)
• John Battelle

Technorati : SEO, adsense, comment spam, google, spam, subdomains, yahoo

I found a pirated copy of my Microsoft – Adobe: Much Ado About Nothing post on Technorati. It was lifted verbatim, except the address got changed to “Microsoft & PDF’s“. I am not a top-blogger, but am already quite used to my content being republished, but normally with attribution to me, and I don’t really care. In this case there was no attribution, the “author” made it look like his original post.

I left a comment, calling it shameless theft, and voila, a little later the post is gone, and this is what I found instead:

“So I left my computer for a few minutes today after updating the blog software and came back to see a post re the MS & Adobe issue on my blog. Kinda funny how it got here coz I never posted it. I did post something about the issue on HWG.

Oh, and if anyone cares…I hate pdf files so if they weren’t included it wouldn’t bother me any.”

Interesting…. has someone set him up? I guess he’s still better off than poor Jack Bauer.Or if he’s not a victim of sophisticated crime, does my feed have magic powers, planting itself on other people’s blogs?

(I am not pointing to the blog in question, after all he took “offending” post off … let him live in piece peace…)

Technorati : attribution, blogging, blogging ethics, blogs, content theft, ethics, plagiarism, zoliblog

Wow, for the first time in my life I’ve just got tipped: 

As it’s the first of the month, it’s BlogTipping Day. The sites I read are plentiful (here’s a list) and diverse and so are the tips.

BlogTip #1: Zoli’s Blog
Author: Zoli Erdos

I read this blog because:

• He consistently introduces new tools and widgets – sharing insights
• Though I rarely visit the actual site (slow load), I like how heshares his Calendar of Events and more so, his del.icio.us tags (I’mgoing to implement the latter) – sharing knowledge
• Lots and Lots of content, lots of humor and wit.

TIP: Aggregators and Browsers are auto-discovering this feed: instead of this feed (../blog/index.xml) instead of your FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/zoli). Here’s a quick fix I wrote about earlier: Are Your FeedBurner Feeds Auto-Discovered?

Thanks Mike.  I’m sorry for the slow load – I hope  John, Blogharbor’s super-helpful owner reads this….

Tags: blogs, blogging, blogtipping, blogharbor, zoliblog

(Updated)
Bloglines is still the market leader amongst web-based feed-readers, but it’s clearly losing market share. Half a year ago almost all my Feedburner subscribers used Bloglines – now it’s back to 28%.

(The chart was produced using Zoho Sheet, here’s the original)

Update (7/4): See feed stats by Neville Hobson and Alex Barnett.

Tags: bloglines, feedreader, feedreaders, feedburner, zoho, zohosheet, zoliblog