Last Saturday, I discovered that a site has been making cross-posts of my feeds and listing me as a contributor to their site. I agree that this may seem as a form of flattery, but, if done without the blogger's permission, it just feels annoying.
This morning I received an email from one of the people from the site, apologizing for the unfortunate situation. I'm a sucker for heartfelt apologies, so I accepted his. Nevertheless, this whole experience brought my attention to how easy it is for people to use your online content. Of course, the reverse is also true -- you can just as easily use other people's content in your site.
I'd like to thank Michael, a fellow blogger, for the heads up. He even provided me and the other bloggers affected (I believe there were about 10 of us) with a helpful link on what we can do about it. Read the very informative article here.
And because we all love lists...
Newsweek has come out with their list of top 100 books. Check it here. As expected, Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, and 1984 are in the top 10, with Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace claiming the top spot. My all-time favorite book, Robert Graves' I, Claudius, came it at #69.
7 comments:
Happy to hear that its all working out. Its true what you said its so easy for someone to steal our content as it is for us to do the same.
Thanks, Cindy! That experience was crazy! I'm glad it didn't happen to you.
Hi Peter,
I did find something on another blog that may help you in the future to see if your blog is being copier. Over at Bookishgal, she has a button in her sidebar for Copyscape. I went to that site, and it can search to see if your content has been copied. Of course, there's a free service, then a paid for service, but if you use it regularly (weekly?), I think you wouldn't need to go with the premium.
Unfortunately, that is only going to let you know if your blog has been copied. I haven't seen anything yet for Blogspot to prevent the copying in the first place.
Another thing you could look into is Google alerts as well, if you are able to put the same unique phrase in every post.
Anyway, hope all is well, you've been added to my blogroll as well.
Michael
Hi Michael! Thanks for the tip. I added you to my blogroll as well.
Hi Peter, I saw that Michael had linked to my Bookishgal blog from here, and it's a shame that your content has been stolen like that. Thanks for the link to that article about things you can do; I think it's going to be very useful.
I was especially interested in one option Lorelle mentioned there, which was to request a ban in search engines. I bet that would really pack a punch in your case, since Blogger is under the umbrella of Google itself. Imagine if they simply wiped all thieving blogs from their search engine entirely! KAPOW!
Anyway, sorry to hear this happened to you. And Michael's right -- checking with Copyscape is a good idea, so you can keep track. That's a good reminder for me to do it more often myself. :)
- Phyl
Hi Phyl! Thanks for the tip. I'll keep that in mind the next time this happens. As much as I'd like to think that this is a unique experience, I'm keeping my guard up.
Aww. Stealing content sucks man. Buti nalang naayos na rin. Some bloggers really have to be careful how they treat content from other blogs. if it's from ezinearticles, oks lang but then from a full blog, that's a no-no.
Glad it's all worked out well.
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