Comments on: Simon says once. But again?

By: Alan Kellogg

Alan Kellogg — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:07:13 +0000

I get them too, I just delete the trackback.

(This blatant spam comment brought to you by the tiger bunny, the number 6, and brown water spacecraft across the universe.

By: Ben James

Ben James — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:06:04 +0000

I’ve recently had entire posts of mine not exactly stolen, but quoted in their entirety and trackback pinged.

I suspect there are spiders searching Technorati for posts on subjects which are big search engine traffic pullers; I wrote an article mentioning the iPhone earlier today and already have had two trackbacks from blogs crammed with iPhone ads.

Thankfully I moderate the trackbacks and so avoid unwittingly helping the spammers with reciprocal links.

By: dburr

dburr — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:41:01 +0000

I also agree with adam

By: Simonsays

Simonsays — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:03:00 +0000

I’ve been cloned!…

Or rather this blog has. Doc Searls spotted this post over at the spammy-looking site, Lalaia – the virtual city, and blogged it. It doesn’t take a close read to spot it’s word-for-word the same post. If you look further…

By: Doc Searls

Doc Searls — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:52:06 +0000

Adam,

There are automata that have been doing this kind of thing for some time. The big payoff, of course, is in gaming Google’s AdSense. Lot more money in that, I suspect, than in spam. But creepy either way.

By: Adam Fields

Adam Fields — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:16:11 +0000

There seem to be an increasing number of spam blogs that just copy posts whole cloth out of the rss feeds of other blogs, sometimes with link attribution and sometimes not.

If you search technorati for my blog, for example, a number of them come up.

I’m really not sure what to do about that. I’d considered blocking them at the IP address level, but I couldn’t figure out what IP address they were coming from and I’d assume that means they’re not hitting my feed directly or not from that machine. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a service out there harvesting posts explicitly for this purpose.

By: Doc Searls

Doc Searls — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:00:25 +0000

Good to hear from you, Simon. Thanks for clearing that up. That must be a spam blog, or splog. I noticed after this post that my RSS reader noted one or two more of the same thing, but with different URLs.

As for guidance on the license issue, here’s what I wrote about it several years ago, when I switched licenses on my old blog.

Woops, that was when I still had a public domain dedication. I switched later to CC 2.5 but can’t find it now.

Maybe later.

By: Michael W. May (Joffi)

Michael W. May (Joffi) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:26:34 +0000

The obvious CC infraction is no CC license copy is distributed on the copy site. They have a section concerning CC, but no CC link on the page of the post.

By: Simon Collister

Simon Collister — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:38:59 +0000

Hi Doc. Thanks for flagging this as I’m not a Lalaian! I’d better go and check the T&Cs of my CC license…. would welcome any expert advice