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This post, "Grow Spot & Plagiarism ~Help from Cold Climate Kathy", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.
Thank you all for your responses to the previous post about the Grow Spot's use of our writing and photos on their site. Here's a link from Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardens giving some advice on protecting your RSS feed from plagiarism. This is from her Blog Coach site.
Mr Brown Thumb wrote a new post on How To Shorten Your Feed.
Thank you both!
I see that Mr. Brown Thumb has wisely returned to his regular programming - that's what I'll do in the next post.
About Me
- Annie in Austin
- Welcome! As "Annie in Austin" I blog about gardening in Austin, TX with occasional looks back at our former gardens in Illinois. My husband Philo & I also make videos - some use garden images as background for my original songs, some capture Austin events & sometimes we share videos of birds in our garden. Come talk about gardens, movies, music, genealogy and Austin at the Transplantable Rose and listen to my original songs on YouTube. For an overview read Three Gardens, Twenty Years. Unless noted, these words and photos are my copyrighted work.
Monday, December 10, 2007
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I'll check out those links. Thanks Annie! The first post on this subject by Mr. Brown Thumb was extremely helpful.
ReplyDeleteNot that I condone this, but I'm reminded of a line from the movie "The Red Shoes" in which a music professor steals from one of his students. The student goes to the impresario who commissioned the professor's work, and the impresario tells the young composer, "It is far worse to have to steal than to be stolen from."
ReplyDeleteAlas, I think that he meant that for someone who supposedly had the integrity of an artist, which doesn't seem to apply here.
In my job, I have to make sure that authors file a copyright form (surrendering all rights to the publisher -- ugh) and that any previously copyrighted pieces are reused with permission. It's truly amazing how many perfectly nonsinister people don't understand the terms of the form that they sign, nor what it means to reuse someone else's work.
As a result of all this, I'm going for a Creative Commons license for my blog. I haven't run across any instances of reuse, but then again, I haven't really looked.
I must say that I'm a little bummed that more people will be shortening their feeds. I tend to read my blogs on Google Reader during breaks at work and tend not to click through from a truncated entry unless it sounds really, really interesting. For example, I only click through to maybe 20-25% of GardenRant's stuff. They have their feeds so short (only about 3 lines) that I usually just say, Meh, not this time. So, I guess the way to go is to have your first 255 words be extraordinarily interesting to grab the feed reader's attention and help them decide to click through.
ReplyDeleteOh well, another case of people screwing up the blog world. I understand why you're doing it - what a bummer to be scraped like that, but it still makes the blog world just a little more unusable.
Sorry, I'm feeling a bit Bah, Humbug today - I'll stop ranting now! :)
Tracy @ Outside
Thanks for alerting us to this problem. I tried to add the "This property belongs to....." that was suggested by Kathy. I want the full rss feed too so people can read easier.
ReplyDeleteContent thieves are definitely ruining things for everyone else. It's so much easier to read in Bloglines. I don't blame you at all, I'd do it too if that were happening to me. I just hate that it's necessary.
ReplyDeleteHey Annie,
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you're going back to what the blog is about. As soon as I write down the post on how to get your items removed from website I'll be going back to talking about plants. That is after all why we do this blogging thing.
Btw,
I just replied to your comment on t he younger-older gardeners post and I've edited that post with a proposition for any "older gardeners" at the bottom. If you're interested check it out and see if you'd like to participate.
Well I just heard about this Grow Spot thing and read all the posts and comments about it on everyone's blogs and my first comment is that I would have heard about it sooner if you guys didn't shorten your feeds.
ReplyDeleteI don't have as much time to visit everyone's site while I'm at work so using a feed reader helps keep me up to date. With everyone shortening their feeds, I'm just out of luck and I bet a lot of other people are too.
My second comment is that when someone uses your feed, as long as they provide a link to your site, they're actually helping your PageRank. Links are something that most webmasters want.
Now if there was no link to your site, then I completely agree with you. They should have to deal with the Flying Monkeys.
Just my two cents.