Monday, June 23, 2008

Scraping status update

Unfortunately, instead of continuing to write about faster than light travel, I have to write about some "problems" I am having with this blog (it doesn't really amount to a problem but still requires to be taken care of) . Hopefully I will continue posting more interesting staff tomorrow.

I recently wrote that some of my posts were scraped. You can read more about this here. To my surprise I found out that most people don't know what scraping is. I wrote about it in the post I linked, so if you don't know what it is read it first.

As of now, I know about 4 blogs that scrap my posts - that is, they post short paragraphs from my posts on their blogs (all of the content of such blogs is just paragraphs collected from other blogs) without proper attribution, and spam me with backlinks. I found the email addresses of all the owners of these blogs (I suspect that there are only two owners - one of them runs three of these blogs). Two of the addresses were fake, but the other two worked.

The email I sent:
------------------------------------------
Hello
I have found out that you took content from my blog post (link) and
placed it in yours (link) without proper attribution. This is a
copyright infringement, please fix it. And don't put my content in
your posts in the future.
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I didn't got a response (that would be too much) but I got some reaction. One of these blogs deleted itself from the Technoroti database. However, the paragraph he took from my post still appears there and it is still not attributed to me.

The other scrapper just ignored me. Also, I found out yesterday that another of my posts was scrapped. I think this happened because I mentioned Einstein in the post - I suspect that the program that selects the content to be scraped uses his name as a keyword, so if I mention him my post is likely to be scraped.

I am thinking about publishing the two email addresses I have. It probably wouldn't help much, but it is something to consider.

I don't think I will write more about this subject - I have more interesting topics to write about. Probably I will start to delete the backlinks I am getting from these blogs, and perhaps I will publish their emails.

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