Gee, I can't even take some blogging time off for the Christmas holiday without some major controversy hitting the blogosphere. Apparently, some splogger has been lifting several bloggers full content surrounded by Google Adsense. Andy Abramson, a fellow VoIP blogger included me in an email thread with several other "heavy-hitting" technology-related bloggers, all of which I assume were getting "splogged". Hard to tell if I was splogged since the culprit's website was taken offline after some complaints and strings pulled by someone whose content was stolen.
Andy points out that back in March that Andy, Om, and I were "splogged". Andy and Om were more upset about it than I was since their full RSS feeds were splogged where as my RSS feed was only a short 40 word excerpt they were taking. Had it been the full XML/RSS feed I certainly would have been just as upset as Andy and Om.
Andy wrote about the March splogging in light of the recent splogging:
If this was the first time, it would be a shock, but back in March I found someone else doing the same thing in a much more commercial light.
A PR person in the Los Angeles area was hired by a marketing company to develop a blogging strategy around VoIP for an enterprise VoIP hardware and service company, call them a VAR for lack of a better description. The PR person's strategy was to “lift” content from Om Malik, me and Tom Keating. I did some digging, while I was over in France via the net, tracked down the actual programmers in Denver who gave me all the details of who was who, they advised that the PR person and so called blogging expert had told them in no uncertain terms that they had permission to use our content, something in the case of Om and I for certain was not true.
Andy expresses his disgust with this recent plagirism as does Om in this post. Andy even writes, "Let's all do our part this Christmas Day to say Bah Humbug to all those in the food chain, including the ad supporting engine that's helping to fuel this plagarism based industry."
Well Andy, I'm sorry to be the bearer of more Bah Humbug news this Christmas holiday, but I came across another splogger called VoIPPlanet.org just last week who is "gaming" you, Om, Rich Tehrani, Skype Journal, Pulver, and others. They're posting the FULL blog entries culled from bloggers' XML feeds. I'd like to provide some more thoughts on this, but technically it's still the Christmas holiday so I should be spending time with my family and not blogging. I'd also like to provide links to those that got splogged and then blogged about being "splogged":. Maybe I'll update this post tomorrow with more outside links and some more thoughts, so stay tuned...Till then, "Splog away! Splog Away! Splog Away all!"
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Tom,
It's all funded by the google economy. Take away that and it will disapear.
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