What's a Splog?

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[Mistress B]

So tell me, someone with great bloggy intelligence than mine?

What's a splog?

I saw it mentioned briefly here somewhere in the past couple of days, but hadn't heard that term before.

Someone has linked to my blog with a "Bettina wrote an interesting article here" line. I had a poke around their blog and it seems to be all references and links to other peoples blogs. Is that a splog?

[Lani]

That sounds exactly like a splog.  I hope you deleted that comment.  Generally, a splog will scrape (ie; steal it via their feeds) other people's content and place it on a site with many ads.  They usually scrape content with particular keywords so they can rank highly for those words without doing any of the work, making money from the work of others.

[Kelley]

I usually get them when I write about my hair  or my car.

Delete, delete, delete.

Unless it is a troll and then humiliate or use as blog fodder. *snort*

[Mistress B]

fortunately none of my msn stalkers have made their way into the bloggy world yet, so I don't think I have any trolls. lol

Shall delete with flair now I know what those comments are. Seemed very strange to me to make a blog consisiting of bits of other people's blogs.

I found my list of new years resolutions on a gambling site of all places!!

[Lani]

Hmm, I usually get them when I talk about my Mum, because she lives in Sudan and has lived in other newsworthy places.

[macgirvin]

I was accused a couple months back of running a splog - so I wanted to interject here. Yes, the 'splog' which you are referring is simple content thievery, often for profit.

In my case, I was merely providing a feed reader that folks could share. It aggregated a lot of lesser known and unknown blogs into one spot so we didn't have to travel all over the net each day to catch up on the interesting ones. I got in a world of trouble and lots of legal threats for doing this - even though I had zero financial motive. Google can do this, but I can't. Copyright law can get downright nasty. I've since had to tell many people that you can get sued for looking at an RSS feed without asking. Many folks are completely surprised by this, but it's true. And note that Australia doesn't have the U.S.'s DMCA law which shields service providers from the actions of their members. The mere act of viewing an RSS feed on another computer without the author's express permission can make you personally liable for copyright violation. If this happens on your website, you could get sued as well.

I have since re-launched the service but with a lot more legalities worked into the design. You can't share a feed with somebody unless you click 'I have permission to do this'. And these aggregated feeds aren't available to non-members. This keeps the content from being re-published and showing up on the Googlebot. The downside of this approach is that folks can't see that I've got an incredibly powerful feed-reader and a wealth of content on my site. It's really sunk the membership rolls.

But back to the initial question - before you label something a splog, one should try and assess the evil intention behind it. If the intention is basically a feed reader with cool features, I wouldn't call that a splog. In either case, if you find your content where it ought not be, send a polite letter before you send in the lawyers. They just make everybody mad, and sometimes the person on the other end isn't aware they're doing anything wrong.

[Mistress B]

ahhh........... have just had another look. Was my smiley list not my NY list........... I mentioned hubby's NRL watch that I bought him for Christmas. I guess that explains the gambling site.

The other one was a exercise site linking to my NY post in which I'd mentioned weight loss and exercise (UGH!)

And the other one linked to a death news site (I had made mention of imaginings of gruesome painful death for my ex) Now THAT one was funky!

[Mistress B]

Hi macgirvin.

The ones I've seen my posts come up in were ad heavy and just all links.

I'm quite sure that it would be one thing to showcase other people's blogs and quite another to just link randomly to everything that matches a search word.

Thanks for the explanation though, I had no idea about all that legal stuff.

I just deleted the comments.

[Lani]

Good points, Mike.  There are legitimate aggregators out there.  I know that my content has turned up in legitimate places as well as splogs and I have a creative commons license so that's fine.  With WordPress, you have the power to mark a splogger's pingback as spam. It's important that we know the difference.

[StephenCronin]

Hi Macgirvin,

it's a difficult one - I'd have no problem with my content appearing in an aggregated service as long as:

1. I know it's happening
2. There's a link to my post
3. They don't strip my links out before publishing
4. My original post appears above the aggregated service's copy in the search engines
5. They're not just using my content to make money

Splogs used to be clear cut, but I've noticed an increasing number of sites which are 'grey'. Most of them will fail on one or more of the above, in which case I consider them a splog.

I wrote a WordPress plugin called FeedEntryHeader which adds a copyright statement (and the original post's url) to the top of my feed entries. Hopefully, someone reading my posts on another site will visit my site to read the original...

[nso]

Is there anything you can do if you find yourself linked to on a splog? I've found my site on a blogger splog (lucky me right next to the porn ads) and Ive flagged the blog. Or should I just get over it and move on?

[Meg]

In my experience they rarely hang around too long (or move on to someone else's content). If they're just taking a snippet (with or without a link) I tend not to worry. But reproducing whole posts is more serious in my opinion.

Lorelle has some excellent advice on what to do when someone steals your content.

[Lani]

I was just about to go looking for the link to that very post! 

[Meg]

Lani - :yes: it's on the bloggers recommended reading list!

FWIW I also wrote about copyright and plagiarism a while back.

[Snoskred]

We need links to those kinds of articles to be published separately in the forums so people can read them but I wonder, should we also be making a list of recommended reads?

[FormerAdmin]

We need links to those kinds of articles to be published separately in the forums so people can read them but I wonder, should we also be making a list of recommended reads?

Hi Snos,

just a suggestion: we could have a "recommended forum threads" page on the blog that links back to them.

Cheers, Andrew

[nso]

Thanks guys, I did a few google searches and came across Lorelle's article. They're just junky links with a few lines of the article, so I'm just going to forget it

[Riayn]

I had my content stolen by a Splog.  Just directly posted on their site without them asking me.  I contacted the site owner and got no response.  So I wrote a huge post naming the Splog and how rude it was to steal content. It appeared on the Splog in its entirety.  The next day, all my content was removed from the Splog.