Blog Scraping: Plagiarism?
on 02.06.06, 06:39am in weblog • comments (2)
After doing some quick ego-surfing this morning to see who’s linking to me via Technorati and Bloglines, I came across several weblogs that are just reposting content of other blogs (some call these "link blogs"). So, I’m curious to see how people are dealing with the problem of "blog scraping".
Most of these sites are just reposting entire posts of weblogs, obviously trying to make money from Google AdSense (there’s tons of ads on the page). I know Om Malik has written in the past about blog plagiarism, but I really wonder if there’s anything as a blog ‘author’ that you can do.
Also - at what point does reposting a link and some content become ’scraping’? I know plenty of times where I quote another weblog - is this considered scraping, or just giving another post context and credit?
Update: I guess these sites are also called "splogs".
X (February 6, 2006 @ 8:49 am)
Google has a strict policy about placing adverts on pages containing copied material. I have had some success snitching these kinds of sites to the Google Adwords police.
AAwoken (February 6, 2006 @ 10:17 am)
Called reblogs as well. There is even software for this. Check http://www.reblog.org/#download
I like the points you make but offer this. Very little of what we write is actually “original”, we just rehash stuff we have read or seen elsewhere.