Disruptive Conversations

If you blog and care about the theft of your content, you should really read this post from the "Lorelle on WordPress" blog: "Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content".

Like most bloggers, my text has been lifted/scraped/stolen... whatever terms you want to use. In a couple of particularly egregious cases, I did actually make the effort to contact the thief and in one case got it taken down. (A marketing company that seemed to be setting up bogus blogs for SEO purposes and populating them with content from various RSS feeds. The CEO was a bit surprised/embarrassed when I called her up on the phone and basically said "Why are you stealing my content?") But I don't have the time to do that with any regularity. I could probably spend all day doing that and have about as much effectiveness as banging my head against a wall. I'd rather write new content and do all those other things that I need to do each day.

So I was a bit saddened to read of this newest development in the constant war between the spammers/sploggers/thieves and the content producers. Now we have people who will take the content of our RSS feeds, mash it up/remix it with synonyms, and put it out in a probably unreadable form... for SEO or whatever purpose they may be paid for.

I do wonder if these people can honestly look at themselves in the mirror in the morning... but yes, they probably can... as far as they are concerned they are finding new and innovative ways to service their clients. There's just this minor little matter that they are stealing our content to do so....

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