5 Alternatives to Truncated Feeds

by

Yesterday, Mark Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection made an announcement that, due to the rampant abuse of their RSS feed, that the site would be moving over to a truncated, or shortened, feed.

However, the decision did not last long. After less than three hours, Ghosh reactivated the full feeds after many of the site’s readers posted comments objecting to the change. He instead said he would experiment with RSS footer and reopen the full feed.

Still, Ghosh’s frustration is more than understandable. With countless spam blogs scraping content without permission, the temptation to deny them access is understandable. However, users overwhelmingly prefer full RSS feeds and denying access to spammers is almost impossible without hindering access by legitimate aggregators.

The good news is that there are alternatives to shortening your RSS feed, practical ways to protect your content without cutting off your readers. [Read more…]

Year of Original Content: Make Money From Copyright Thieves

by

Ask First Copyright badge - by Lorelle VanFossenI and Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today have long been advocates of copyright protections and education, leading the way with projects such as “Ask First,” the “Year of Original Content,” “5 Content Theft Myths and Why They Are False,” and “The 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft.”

It seems that the rest of the world is waking up to the fact that stolen content is big business. Within the past two years, there are a variety of services you can use to track where your online content has gone, report and stop it. A new project is underway called the Fair Syndication Consortium that might put a dollar amount on that stolen content, paying you for others abusing your content. [Read more…]

WordPressDirect: Blogging Tool or Spam Engine?

by

A recent post on Mashable regarding a tool called WordPress Direct elicited a great deal of passion on both sides. One commenter, for example, called the service a “one stop shop spam blog engine” while another, who claims to have used the service, said it was “a simple solution to adding new posts to a blog in between longer, hand written posts”.

But what is clear is that tools like WordPress Direct are becoming more and more common. Part of the double-edged nature of open source development is that, while most will use the license to extend the product in healthy ways, a few will do so in ways that can be used for unethical purpose. Though this is not an argument against open source, more and more tools like WordPress Direct have sprung up, often charging high monthly fees for “maintenance free” blogging.

But what does WordPress Direct do and is it a spam tool? The answer is complicated and made more so by the fact that the nature of spam and even the definition of spam is a moving target. However, it is clear that WordPress Direct, along with similar products, have a lot of potentially dangerous uses and, if its marketing is any indication, those uses are very much by design. [Read more…]

Blog Scams: Blog Scams Are a Growing Business

by

While I can excuse those who overhype their Plugins, Themes, and contests on their blog, I have a hard time forgiving those who use their blogs as scams. As the blog platform becomes more ubiquitous and easier to use with a lot of automatic content generating tools and comment and trackback spam tools, blogs are being used more and more for the dark side of blogging.

In The Thin Line Between Legitimate Blog Models and Scams, Weblog Scout writes that there is a think line between a scan and legitimate blog model as scammers tend to use the same tools as legit blogs do, such as autoblogging WordPress Plugins, auto-pings, mass site submission tools, and feed scrapers: [Read more…]

Blog Scams: There Is Nothing Like This Anywhere

by

I hate hyperbole, and what really infuriates me are claims that “there is nothing like this anywhere!” Oh, really.

With the modern treasure trove called search engines, there is little left in the world that can’t be found, and odds are that your original, can’t be found anywhere, is findable. Have you looked?

A few months ago, a WordPress Plugin author claimed that he had the first Plugin of this kind. I knew of three others published over the past few years that did the same thing, and two did it better. I didn’t need a search engine to find that out, but why didn’t he search first before making the claim?

A day later, a WordPress Theme designer told me that he’d designed a Theme that was such an original, he bet me I couldn’t find anything similar. I found over twenty five similar Themes with a Google search before calling it quits.

Another blogger bragged to me that he was going to hold a contest unlike any other contest. No one in the world had ever done anything like it. When I told him that two similar contests were held over the past couple years exactly like his, one was a success and the other a failure, he was really angry at me for taking the wind out of his sails. I wished him good luck anyway. Maybe his would work, but bragging about it as the “only one of its kind” isn’t the truth. [Read more…]