Today was a slow day for me as nothing was pissing me off enough to write about so I spent some quality (ha!) online reading time.
Then suddenly, as I surfed around to every mind numbing little technical blog, it hit me right between the eyes today that all of them were posting similar lame ass little quips about the same lame ass stories and the rest of them were stealing those lame ass little quips.
Give us all a fucking break and stop 'fair use' quoting the only 2 or 3 people that ever write anything useful on a daily basis as a temptation to drag us to your goddamn websites.
If bloggers really don't have anything to say that adds any value to the story then why not just move along and find something truly worthy of comment?
We know why that is, you have no talent and couldn't write something new if a story snuck up and bit you on the ass!
Besides, the sick truth about this large chain of blogrolling snippet quoting assholes is that they're all fighting for the same few eyeballs to land on their page just so someone will click on their AdSense ads to pay for their smouldering cigarettes sitting next to their keyboards.
The fancy word for this is "monetizing" their blogs.
It doesn't matter if they don't actually do the work, don't actually write the stories, they just cut and paste clips from other web sites and forums all day long trying to become an authority site on some topic where they've never written anything original in their own words except "Bob from XYZ forum said..." or "Fred from ABC said..." yet try to profit off all these clips and links to other sites.
Seems to me that monetizing large collections of so called fair use clips is a strictly commercial motive of profitting from the work of others, it's not editorial whatsoever, and when you have nothing original to add it steps over the line into copyright infringement.
Someone will eventually teach these bottom feeding scumballs a very serious lesson about copyright before it's all over.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Most Tech Bloggers are Parrots and Thieves
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6 comments:
By your definition, most newspapers are also parrots and thieves. They pull information from the same sources (AP/Reuters) and then package it in a way to maximize revenue.
I don't think there's anything particularily wrong with that. The newspapers are performing a service by reducing the huge amount of available information down to something that interests their readers.
Bloggers are doing the same exact thing. They pull together the stories that they think interest their potential audience, then try to make money with advertising.
Apples and Oranges comparison.
The web sites I'm talking about don't show the entire article which the newspaper does, and these sites also add no value to the process which the newspaper does, and they don't pay for their content which the newspaper does.
There's a huge difference between a mix of syndicated content mixed with home grown content vs. nothing but page after page of snippets of no-value-added scraped content being monetized.
Even a discussion thread attached to the site with members adding comments gives value, the sites I describe don't even have that value either as they are just junk spam sites.
It's not fair use, it's fair abuse.
Maybe I should've been more specific as I'm not trying to lump all Tech Bloggers in the same heap as I like many of those sites, and I really didn't want to post any referrence links to the bottom feeders because I didn't want to give them any link love if you know what I mean.
Think of these snippet sites like a twisted affiliate program as we all know the affiliates drove the original store owners so far down in the search engines that now they depend on the affiliates to survive.
This situation is similar in that the real content blogs provide content and the snippet blogs all try to quote the best keyworded parts to rank higher than the original sites in order to snatch the clicks on AdSense before the visitor ever makes it to the real content.
This practice could theoretically destroy the very content they are quoting if it becomes less lucrative for the actual content provider.
Leeches pure and simple.
The large collection of free-loading monetizing snippet clippers out there really deserve to get the boot off the web just to clean up the SERPs as they are all just MFA (Made for AdSense) spam pure and simple.
Not sure if you have noticed this ad via Adsense. It says Copy any website in minutes prices start at $ 10. I feel it is hightime adsense takes caper sites seriously.
Cut/Paste
I'll blog that!
So true...
I see what you mean now. I guess I misread it as an attack on uncreative bloggers.
I've noticed my posts on certain forums appearing on the "scrape" sites. My favorite was one about midget strippers.
Good article! And a good link about 'Fair use'. I del.icio.us-ed both. Thanks for your comment on performancing.com.
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