CATEGORIES
- NYC COVERAGE
- WEB STARTUPS
- WEB NEWS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB TECH JOBS
- VENTURE CAPITAL
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- ADVERTISING
- VIDEO
- ALL TOPICS
- ALL COMPANIES
CONTRIBUTORS
- ADRIAN CHAN
- ALICIA NAVARRO
- ALLEN STERN
- CORSIN CAMICHEL
- DRAMA 2.0
- DARREN HERMAN
- HANK WILLIAMS
- MARK DAVIS
- RICK TUROCZY
- SANFORD DICKERT
- SHANNON CLARK
- Comment on YouTube Down by DVS01
- Comment on Twitter COO Costolo: Advertising Coming To Twitter Soon by Satoshi Nakajima
- Comment on Twitter COO Costolo: Advertising Coming To Twitter Soon by OMG Stop the Web! Twitter is gonna run ads ? and Scoble says you?ll love it
- Comment on What?s Up With Yahoo Mail Delivery? by MJ
Attributor Names Socialmedian Worst Splogger for a Top Web 2.0 Blog
Earlier this week we wrote about Socialmedian leaving beta. Socialmedian is a popular social sharing tool with the early adopter crowd. I became concerned when I saw the huge amounts of source content that is included in postings on Socialmedian. There are plenty of ways that Socialmedian could operate without the extended scraped excerpt.
This evening I was called to a story by Svetlana at Profy. Svetlana has an indepth review of a new service called Fairplay by Attributor. The Fairplay service aims to help you locate scraped (i.e. splogged) content across the Web so you can take the necessary actions against the involved parties. During her testing, Fairplay staffers evaluated her content feed to find out where the scraped/splogged content is located across the Web. Svetlana notes (my emphasis):
It was very interesting for me to watch what the product was capable of and see who was engaged the most in stealing my content (Social Median seemed to be the site viewed as the worst splogger by Attributor). The major revelation to me was that the post that was republished the most (without permission or a link back more than a hundred of times compared to the usual a few times per post) was the one that was very popular on Google News – so it looks like sploggers use Google News for their content.
My guess is that a lot of Profy’s content gets shared on Socialmedian and that’s why they show up as the "worst splogger".
Note that I believe that Socialmedian isn’t maliciously scraping the content whereas there are real sploggers out there who make a living at scraping a full feed into their own site. I’ve got about 5 of them on CN, I see what looks like 80-100 scraped splogs for larger sites like Mashable.
This is silly Allen. If I read your post correctly you’re saying that socialmedian is the site that Profy’s content is most often shared on. Is that a bad thing? And EVERY post on socialmedian includes a link back so have no idea what you are talking about.
So tell me Jason, why do you need to include any content on the page? And if so, why so much?
I assume you block Google from indexing the pages that feature other’s content – correct?
Let’s start there.
Jason, in fact, Attributor provides plenty of information to see how sites that republish our content handle it – like if they have links back (you do) or if they place ads alongside our content (you don’t). I have not accused Social Median of splogging, I just thought it was funny that a service that is “named the #2 new web service by a leading silicon valley blogger” and is enjoying rising popularity in the crowd even appears to look like a splog to a third-party service that works with the largest publishers like Reuters to track their content for them. Maybe it is some indication that something should be changed in the default setting for Socialmedian not to look this suspicious? Just an idea, though.
Hi Allen,
Just to clarify your points above – Svetlana’s comments are based on an Attributor report we ran for the profy feed which lists the top sites where your content is reused plus other info like if ads are on the page and/or linkbacks. As you and Jason point out, this can be a very good thing, especially if they link back to you. It really depends on the author and how they wish to license their work.
This is one of the key concepts behind FairShare – you assign your license and your results are tailored to your licensed. I see that you signed up for beta – it will be a few weeks before we are ready for more testers, but I’m eager to get your feedback.
Let me know if you have questions!
Rich