New type of spammers and scrapers
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This is just an informational post about a new type of spamming and scraping that is now going on called “spinning” where scrapers will capture your feed and then use a program that will go through and using a thesaurus-type algorithm, change certain words so that it what they end up with does not read exactly like what you originally wrote in hopes you will not notice if you find it.
Lorelle has a very informative post that talks about it and also has input from some legal types on the subject at: http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/11/15/spinning-spammers-steal-our-blog-content/
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That is a little frightening, but really not surprising to me, sadly enough. They will continue to keep getting better at that! Only real option now is just turn the RSS feed off ;)
Trent
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I like the Feedburner “uncommon uses” mentioned in The Blog Herald post that Lorelle linked to. Worth a read.
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i have resigned to the fact that anything i post in the Internet will become open to what i call internet harvesters. people in general do not seem feel that they are stealing when taking “virtual” versus tangible properties. it is a different mentality, and very unfortunate for those who are trying to make a fair living by making their works available online.
however, this does not mean that i have totally given up. if internet harvesters want so badly to harvest my stuff, then they will have to work for it. for example, if i post any pictures online, i would watermark them, and also embed as much meta data details in the pictures. so, if harvesters want to make my stuff to look like their own, then there will be a lot of cleaning up to do before my stuff looks decent. this is certainly not fool proof, but it would deter some lazier harvesters.
by the way, how do you turn off RSS feed? i have browsed through my settings but cannot seem to find a setting to turn off RSS feed.
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Only “private” blogs have no rss feeds. The rest of us can only reduce the rss feeds to “1” post. We can set it at “0” if we choose but it defaults to “1”.
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It seems there’s a site that picks up on the word ‘guitar’ at http://guitar.yourblogsearch.com/
I’ve made a couple of posts lately about Guitar Hero and it’s picked up on them each time with the usual trackback saying “[…] You can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here […]”. It’s easy enough to delete the comment, but it’s annoying that it happens in the first place. :(
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Reporting the blogs to Google is highly effective, I must say. I’ve killed about five of them that way. Google always tells you it needs the proper legal forms, etc, etc, but in truth they do seem to investigate and take their adsense down, although it takes about a week. No adsense, no blog scrapers.
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@raincoaster – How does one do that? Is there an online form or a link? This is happening to me several times a week with sites that have no contact info, no whois info I can find, etc.
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Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Google AdSense
here’s the link http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html -
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I dont’ actually use that.
Anywhere you see Adsense at the bottom of it is a link to Google. Hit that. At the bottom of that form is a place to report the blog for abuse. Do that. It’s like three or four steps. Do it EVERY DAY until the adsense is gone.
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On a sidenote, it really annoys me when blogs only have one post in the RSS feed, especially on days when I’ve been to busy to read some of them only to find there are more post than the feed displays..
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I read Lorelle’s post and almost left a comment, but didn’t feel like antagonizing her. So maybe I’ll make the comment here, instead: I don’t understand why this should matter to me. There are so many greater injustices in the world that need our attention! The content from my self-hosted blog as well as the blogs I administer here gets scraped on a regular basis, and find I am neither flattered nor irritated. I simply don’t care. Why should I? And if the scrapers do this word-substitution thing, stealing only my syntax, I see even less reason to be concerned. What am I missing here?
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You’re not missing anything. My self hosted blog gets scraped every time a post goes up and my blog posts here are occasionally scraped too. But like you I don’t find this to be something to get worked up over either.
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