You have to be kidding me.. before I begin, this post may contain content that might be offensive to advertisers and small children..
Evolutionary theft
So not only is bitacle.org cramming advertising into every spare pixel, they’ve now added ‘digg this’ to their every-evolving quest to squeeze every last cent out of ’stolen’ content.
Now, whilst you might be screaming “but doesn’t that help drive traffic?! what the hell are you on, bro?!” there’s a catch.
It doesn’t digg the owners url.. oh no, that would deprive bitacle income — it appears to digg the sploggers copy. If there is one saving grace, either the javascript is busted, or digg is blocking the incomming dugg’s as they never show up over at digg1.
Five finger discounting
Assuming Jesus “I love to steal content.. bitch!” Gletz manages to actually have digg requests validate, then any folks who happen to ‘digg’ the article will not be doing the original content owner a favour, despite the best of intentions.
This is obviously an escalation on bitacle’s part to try an legitimise their slice of the splogger pie and is clear indication that they have no intention of slowing down.
Indeed they’re still ripping off content with gay abandon as the entries from the ‘foo are still being grabbed. Any additions of IP addresses or referrer URI’s is having a limited effect as the crawler’s name keeps changing.
Gimmie the cash
Google, whilst in an unenviable position of having to walk the middle line in regards to adsense, should consider the greater good here. They’re going to be making a good deal of the green stuff through stolen content — something the TLAs should be updated to reflect as account suspending offences.
It may seem like this is all a bit of an over reaction.. and that may be so, but.. should you have a blog, try searching on bitacle for it — you may not feel quite the same way.
- .. a quick test appears to prove this, however I am happy to be corrected. (↩)
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of annoyances, google, rants, search, spam.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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Oct 7th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Google certainly will punish the ranking of bitacle one day, but never ban them.
Besides that, splogs will always exist and have severals ways of grabbing content.
I notice you use antileech, which is a great plug-in, but it can’t protect you from sploggers grabbing your content at technorati or tag-SEs. Personally I am not bothered by bitacle and never checked them for content I have written (not only my blog), but I did notice some splogs publishing certain articles of mine, merely based on tags.
If I were to write a bot, I would grab content at bloglines.com ;-)
Oct 7th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Thanks for the comments.
[quote comment=”5241″].. I notice you use antileech, which is a great plug-in, but it can’t protect you from sploggers grabbing your content at technorati or tag-SEs.[/quote]
This is quite true. In a way it’s easier to let splogs get away with it than not - however for all the exposure it might bring, the downside (doubly so now at least one splogger is digg’ing there own stolen copy) is that any really exceptional content allows the splogger to garner increased revenue at the expense of the original owner.
I’m going to change tacks however - trying to block content will never be a long term solution.. rather I am considering adding a small “for more great content..” style ‘footnote’ to the RSS feed template(s).
I may not be able to stop the theft, but I can at least point folks in the right direction. :)
Nov 30th, 2006 at 1:17 am
Does any one know how digg does those google ads so they are just one large one at the top?
Jump on to any digg article to see what i mean (cant post links yet)