Splogs, Aggregators and RSS

A few of you use and I hope find useful my Canadian Bullet. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t: at the moment it has dropped my feed. I have been working on it and I am hoping it will work better as the election draws near.

This is affectionately known as an aggregator. I try to make sure that it only shows short excerpts and that the links go to the blog the excerpt comes from. This does not always happen; but that is the intent. It has ads and, without violating the Google terms of service, I can happily report that I may well make a beer a month if I stick to domestic.

In God blog land in the US it has dawned on the great and the good that RSS contains within it the possibility of the “splog” - that is an automated blog which takes content, slaps ads on it and sends it out into the world. This is seen as evil.

But, and who would have thought it, it seems that some people are taking whole blog entries and republishing them. Steve Rubel is pissed. But,

Beyond going to partial text RSS feeds - which I am loathe to do - I have really no other course of action right now other to email the site operators, which I have done.
micropersuasion

I can’t quite see what his objection to partial text, aka excerpts is; but the fact is that he has that option and chooses not to use it. He should because the aggregating software is not that brilliant. I always try to get excerpts for the Bullet, partially for copyright reasons, mainly because it is not that interesting to have great chunks of text on a summary site.

Mark Cuban, owner of Icerocket.com goes a step further.

At icerocket.com , we define a splog as any hosted website that only uses redirected or copied content and doesnt add any unique value. Aggregation is not value add. Why ? Because a search on any blog engine should uncover the unique content on their original source. If a blog isnt updated by human hands, we dont want it in our index.
blog maverick

Well, it’s his search engine and he can do what he wants to; but he is missing the point of excerpt aggregators.

If I want to find out what is going on in the Canadian blogosphere I can take a boo at the Bullet or Canconv. If I want to check out tech, www.memeorandum.com, where I got this story is untouched by human hands. Digg.com is all about gazillions of human hands. diggdot.us puts slashdot and digg together. Welcome to Web 2.0.

The thing of it is that automation, particularily when it comes to assembling summaries, is a critical and useful task for the web.

Aggregation is in its infancy. Right now people are trying to get a handle on how to present the information. Once that is mastered the real skill is going to hit - editing. Choosing the feeds, editing the product, fashioning commentary.

The blog Gods seem to want to strangle the creature at birth. They see the aggregators as scam driven attempts to grab Adsense dollars - if only. In fact, aggregators are going to quickly become the clearing houses for new media that the public needs to make sense of the firehose of information pouring down their cable connections.

One thing which the aggregators will do is make search engines less necessary. For people with a time budget, three or four key aggregators with editors they have come to trust will replace hours of searching. Which is not good news for search engines but may be excellent news for freelance editors.

In web 1.0 we had useful spots like Arts and Letters Daily and Blog Critics which were human edited and built. This was, to a degree, both a virtue and a necessity. At the time there was no other way. Now there is.

The Blog Gods will just have to get over it and learn to excerpt.

Written by jay on December 12th, 2005 with 10 comments.
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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Sean
#1. December 12th, 2005, at 1:10 PM.

“The Blog Gods will just have to get over it and learn to excerpt.”

Um, no. I serve my content how I like it. Those who have a problem with it can bite me. Those who can create compelling new content will always be at a premium, whereas those who merely rearrange are a dime-a-dozen.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com jay
#2. December 12th, 2005, at 2:49 PM.

No question that anyone can serve content any way they want; but if they do and publish a full feed they may see their content “repurposed”.

And, yes, quality content rules; but the ability to access quality content easily has a value. Technorati makes some of it easy. Look up the tag “beer and popcorn”. So does Memeorandum. These add value in a significant way simply by letting people check in easily.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Alan
#3. December 12th, 2005, at 8:57 PM.

I agree and I disagree. In terms of my two blogs, one is amateur (GX40) and one may turn professional in some sense by the end of 2006 (beer blog). If someone were to grab even selections of the beer blog writing and make money off it but not pay me I would be pissed. If someone were to note my idle thoughts, I don’t worry so much. This may not be logical as each site has the same Google ads and the same potential to have more ads and GX40 gets five times the traffic. But I should have control and people should have to ask permission. Otherwise you will see buttons added into the RSS feed soon that will allow the source of the writing to know exactly who is drawing the feed, who republishes and runs ads and sets how I can send spam and other rubbish to just those aggregators but not the others.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Sean
#4. December 12th, 2005, at 10:31 PM.

“If someone were to grab even selections of the beer blog writing and make money off it but not pay me I would be pissed.”

Exactly. I don’t much care if people rebroadcast my personal ramblings from the Urban Refugee, but I’ll be out for blood if I catch people misuing my images. I make a point of gang registering them all with the U.S. Copyright Office so that the statuatory infringement fines kick in.

I’m looking forward to the day I catch someone with a good bankroll using my images without permission. I figure I can turn that into a Hasselblad H1 with a Phase One 39 megapixel back and some very nice glass hanging off the front.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Robert McClelland
#5. December 13th, 2005, at 1:47 AM.

I think this clown is completely missing the value of these aggregators. They enable blog readers to scan ten times as many blogs to find interesting content as they can even with an rss reader. And with the blogosphere growing at an astonishing rate resulting in watered down conten,t these aggregators become worth their weight in gold; even if some of them don’t function correctly 100% of the time.

Anyway, ignore these twits who are probably Americans that don’t understand how organized a few of us have made the Canadian political blogosphere for its readers.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Robert McClelland
#6. December 13th, 2005, at 1:50 AM.

By the way, there’s a very simple code that you can use to make this aggregator only publish excerpts. I used it on the blogging dippers feed and it works perfect.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Flea
#7. December 13th, 2005, at 10:43 PM.

I for one would like you to stop lifting content from my blog for your aggregated site. I would also be grateful if you might suggest how I could disable whatever RSS thingee is active with my site that allows people to do this.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com jay
#8. December 13th, 2005, at 11:09 PM.

Flea, Done. But you do have my email address. I’ll take a look at your site and there is no reason that the RSS can’t be disabled.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Sean
#9. December 14th, 2005, at 12:04 AM.

“I would also be grateful if you might suggest how I could disable whatever RSS thingee is active with my site that allows people to do this.”

:-(

Nick, I generally track your site thru my RSS reader. I’m on dialup so I take a massive bandwidth hit each time I visit your home page — picking off the individual articles that interest me is a much more efficient. If you disable your RSS you’ll lose a lot of traffic from myself, and, I suspect, others as well.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com James Bow
#10. December 15th, 2005, at 10:10 AM.

Out of curiosity, Robert, what program do you use for the Blogging NDP site? CaRP? I’m thinking of switching away from what I’m using for the BANPC, since it requires RSS feeds and chokes on atoms.

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