Blog networks changing history?

There is no concrete way of preventing that from happening. If someone wants to copy ‘this’ post, that person will still do it and remove the stuff at the end of the post.

Search experience is getting poluted with all the blog postings. Blogs should be excluded from the normal search and should be kept separate. There is too much junk out there!

Yup, that curve ball has been moving towards home plate for some time now. However don’t be fooled. It’s top of the ninth bases loaded. Google abuser who has stepped up to the plate, now has a count of 2s-0b. I see that a lot no attribution for posts etc… Proverbial reality is going to one day hit the fan.

Dileepa P, agree completely except for the separation.

The search engines are really falling short, and it’ll get much worse. The semantics of the internet search algorithms that worked fine yesterday are no longer apt to the task.

Isn’t copying the post an infringement of copyright?

I think we just witnessed the first Scoble microchunk.

Most networks have no intent of “locking out” the others. In fact, I’m sure WIN (the company in this case) doesn’t either. There is no directive on our network to “source internal blogs first”. In fact, I’d rather bloggers sourced other blogs first, as it extends the conversation.

Nope, I didn’t read this article at http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ . But I did read it at http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs/ .

Then again, I read it knowing that it did come from the scobleizer, so attribution was still kept.

And I agree it’s a problem.

Jeremy: WIN isn’t the network I was thinking of in this case, although it was the convenient example. SEO’s are hiring networks of “authoritative” bloggers to link to their stuff. That locks everyone else out.

Sourcing of blog posts has always been a thorny issue but the main point of the example that you linked to (mine in this case) was to carry it so far to change published posts with proper attribution to replace it with an internal source. That is just plain wrong.

Robert – whicxh seo ?? If a-listers are being “paid” to link to their “stuff”. We would like to know whom your concerns are about ??

We have discovered white page txt/doorway methods and commented on various forums. Yup bmw.de was one of them and then all the other a-listers picked up the chatter ands began blogging about it !!

So I am not sure extactly what you concern is or are stating some thing that we don’t about (yet !)

Could you be a littler clearer with a concrete e.g ?

/pd: I didn’t say “a listers.”

I said “authoritative.” It’s real easy to be authoritative and still be on the “Z list.”

I’m not particularly surprised by this development. This happened with print media (Hearst, Knight-Ridder) and broadcast media. Blogging is just another medium.

The advantage is that we should be able to “out” plagarism and similar tactics because consolidation is harder on the internet and (to quote DWiner) – these things can simply be exposed and then routed around.

Uhm, “remove blog posts from search engines…”, what? How about if the
engines build better algorithms that can effectively deal with blogs and how they work (or don’t work as the case may be.)

Removing the content of blogs is looking backward not forward. It would be a retreat to “safe” ground, ineffectual and obsolete the usefulness of search engines. Metrics for relevance that are not as heavily skewed towards counting will eliminate the ability of such “lockouts” and content pollution.

Apply heat to the content locators not the content producers.

Uhm, “remove blog posts from search engines…”, what? How about if the
engines build better algorithms that can effectively deal with blogs and how they work (or don’t work as the case may be.)

Removing the content of blogs is looking backward not forward. It would be a retreat to “safe” ground, ineffectual and obsolete the usefulness of search engines. Metrics for relevance that are not as heavily skewed towards counting will eliminate the ability of such “lockouts” and content pollution.

Apply heat to the content locators not the content producers.

Since I am the lead blogger on TUAW, I thought I would chime in. No one WIN has EVER told me to link network blogs before outside blogs. We post like crazy about Apple stuff and every once and awhile we link to Engadget or Hack A Day, but it isn’t like we are a link farm for other WIN blogs.

With that said, I am in talks with the blogger who posted the bit about the iTablet to see what’s what.

Blogsearch is going to change the world because of its powerful network effects. I do believe there are ways and I have concepts to get around these things, but no one has really presented the solution yet, atleast to me.

I agree with matt, we don’t want to take a step back and retreat to what we think is safe. Teh search engines need to step up to the plate and start dealing with this issue so the general public doesn’t have to think or even worry about it.

Umm groupthink echo-chamber linking, stealing content, blog spammers, Ad Sense scammers, you just now realizing this? Knock, knock, anyone home? But whatever they been slipping into your water at that Conference, drink more of it. I like this “new” Robert Scoble. Funny thing, when The Register, Nick Carr, JCD and everyone else said this way back when, you pissed on them for being jealous, just wanting traffic and “not getting blogs”. But you do come around, 2 years later.

Scoble, your title, and the first phrase of your post, imply that many “networks” are doing this. Saying “blog networks are doing this” and saying “some people are starting to pull together bloggers to do this” are two very different things.

Kind of like the difference between “Microsoft is anticompetitive and squashes the competition” and “in the past, Microsoft hasn’t always had its competitors best interests at heart”.

Y’know that “if 1% of my readership” bit? Well, how about if 1% of your readers start thinking that blog networks are just around to incestuously link, create link farms, game search engines and abuse users?

I know that’s not what you mean, and I know it wouldn’t happen, but considering your rant earlier about the importance of titles…

Bullsh*t. Don’t publish your stuff in a public medium then.

I have been contacted by the blogger who ran the TUAW post that started this. She has assured me that the post never attributed to my article and thus was never changed. I have no reason to doubt her, I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt until it is proven that that attitude is a mistake.

At this point it appears that either Blogniscient or Technorati generated the error as part of the search results. This is scary enough but I’ve never seen this happen before.

I am going to return to blogging about mobile tech, which is the purpose of my blog.

As far as I’m concerned, the best way to defend yourself from sploggers is microchunking – you can’t prevent an RSS feed from getting syndicated to the “wrong” places, so you might as well embed the attribution (or maybe an ad) within the feed itself. I wrote about this microchunked solution back in December:

http://mashable.com/2005/12/31/why-online-media-should-be-free-and-why-we-should-embrace-the-splogophere/

I’m not sure if there’s a 100% foolproof way to make this work – after all, links and ads can be stripped out by really determined sploggers. And when you start putting attribution and/or ads in your feed, you’ve got to be careful not to annoy your readers. Either way, you can’t prevent your feed from being republished, so you either need to accept it or turn it to your advantage with microchunking.

Every ecology breeds parasites. Pack behavior and “lock out” of non-pack memebers is just another adapation and survival strategy in the real world… to see it in the Parallel World is not surprising.

However, this is certainly not a “good thing”… to the extent that spam blogs, link farms, clickfraud, and the like pollute the information environment it reduces the “dietary content” of hardcore infovores like yourself and the rest of us.

The race of tool and technique for better, more efficent hunting / gathering of our information diet is unfortunately not without competitive pressures. As much as I do not like that fact, it is what it is.

For further regarding biological models for Internet activities and their utility for analysis, please take a look at

http://kentsimperative.blogspot.com/2006/02/naming-haunt-of-all-ghosts.html

Hi, I’m the person that posted the supposedly non-attributed (plagiarized?) post. I’m fairly sure that by reading my posts on tuaw/hackaday/engadget you will see that i link back to the original source every single time. This particular ebay auction for the post was sent to me via email in the hackaday tip line and I had no idea that JK of jkontherun.com had a post about the same auction. I didn’t tamper with the post nor would I!

People who know me know that I am the sort of girl who stands up for free speech, open-ness of information, good linkbacks (good finds get “stolen”/non-attributed from hackaday often, btw). I run three OS’es, many types of hardware, and love to get to the bottom of a tech mystery. Read my stuff (and other stuff from weblogs inc blogs), you’ll see I post [via] and direct links (sometimes more than once in a post!).

Cheers,
fbz
aka Fabienne Serriere
tuaw/hackaday/engadget

I saw the comment by James but didn’t realise he was the author of the first post you linked to. Here’s the follow-up on his blog: http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2006/02/last_post_on_th.html (conclusion being it’s more likely to be a Blogniscient or Technorati glitch).

Which does raise the question: the situation is theoretically possible (and nasty) — do we have examples in the wild of this happening? (besides the “blog networks do this all the time”?)

BTW, one way of settling things (or at least, an interesting thing to do) would have been to check referrer stats for the initial post. On the server.