FairShare Archive

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.