If you are reading this on PolitickerNV then we humbly suggest you follow us directly at Dullard Mush or subscribe to our RSS feed just like this company is doing except, you know, without the whole posting our content in its entirety on their site without our permission thing.
Apparently the New York Observer owned site has ceased creating original content and instead has become an aggregator of local Nevada political blogs. In fact, our post on Southwest's Vegas airfares was PolitickerNV's most read last week. The problem? It was our entire post, not just a sentence or two like most aggregators. (Warning! For reasons explained below, PolitickerNV readers may need to click "read more" now!) And it's not the only one of ours that has been scraped.
Looking over Politicker's recent incarnation it seems like our feed is being copied at about 100 to 120 words, while others are in the 60 or less area. And let's face it, on those days when you don't feel like pontificating ad nauseam, you're going to have posts that fall into that range. Four of our last six have been that way and each was copied word for word by PolitickerNV. And on one that they didn't, Tweet Congress, they left off a continued [...] indicator letting people know there was more to the post.
Some might say why bitch about more exposure and a chance to land new readers. And in theory they might have a point. But the actual stats don't bear out. At all.
It looks like PolitickerNV started this practice on December 18th (ironically, with one of our posts on push polling) after ceasing original content on the 11th. When we ran our Feedburner stats for uncommon uses, PolitickerNV showed up as having 266 views as of January 4th. Out of those views we had exactly one click-thru to Dullard Mush. One.
Google Analytics was a little more generous as it said PolitickerNV had sent 10 visits in that 12/18-1/04 time frame. Of course, of that number a half dozen or more were us trying to figure it all out. So you are looking at anywhere from one to four visits total. To put that number in perspective, during the 18-day period Local So-and-So sent us 30. Even outside.in sent more (17). So you can toss out the "they're helping build your readership" argument.
But what is probably the most aggravating is this isn't some scammer in Eastern Europe scraping content for his Made-for-Adsense site. This is a newspaper-owned site that actually produced some interesting and exclusive stuff during the election season. They didn't really engage with other bloggers or commenters and, now that I think about it, Wally Edge never did pay me the $5 he publicly offered, but there was some good work done. But no more.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Why Is PolitickerNV Stealing My Content?
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I've set up an aggregate of Nevada news feeds on Twitter. I'm working on doing the same for Nevada blogs. It's a consolidation of feeds; however, if you go the Nevada news page on Twitter (http://twitter.com/nevadanews), you'll see any content to be read has to be clicked to its original source. I think this is an okay way of doing this. Perhaps there should be an opt-out option?
You're right, Bob. Posting headlines and providing links is the way the web works. It looks like PolitickerNV is doing the scoundrel deed of simply stealing posts without asking for permission.
Reno and Its Discontents was an aggregator through the Summer of '08. She had full posts, with the main page being summaries and links, but she asked and everyone on there had opted in. That, along with the Twitter feed you're setting up, is completely acceptable, but what Politicker is doing is not.
Bob, yeah I have no problem with the typical aggregator as most, like yours, just run a headline and a line or so. But Politicker is using way too many words of my feed. Plus their lack of using a continued indicator [...] on my posts that do run longer, like this one, makes it appear like a complete post. (For some reason most of mine end on a completed paragraph over there.)
For the amount of info they are taking from my feed, and whoever set it up can see it is twice as much as the others they are using, they should have either asked me or fixed the word count. That's my beef.
I was wondering the same thing yesterday when I hit their site. I noticed it and thought you were getting paid by them now and was happy for ya. Hope they sort it out soon.
I quit going there a long time ago. It's just a 'cut and paste' blog with no substantial skills whatsoever. As NevaDUH blogs go, it has to be ranked last.
I like the opt-out option. Opting in seems incongruent with what are already publicly available feeds, often promoted front and center on sites. They're there to be 'republished' elsewhere. That said, what PolitickrNV is doing seems above and beyond something I would be comfortable with. I agree, also, about the site. It never grabbed me and I find it difficult to look at, let alone read.
I had to check out Politicker to see what you were talking about, and I thought it was pretty funny to see "Why Is PolitickerNV Stealing My Content?" as one of its top stories!
It seems like a way to hack around this would be if you could tell Feedburner to only send them a partial feed, while sending a full feed to everyone else. Or even to cut them off completely. I don't know if Feedburner has that built in, or how it would even be possible.
This is the problem with the dual nature of RSS. It's used both to let readers subscribe to the site, and for other sites to syndicate your stuff. There's a lot of honor system involved there, and we need tools in place to cut someone off from our end when they start misbehaving. But we also need the big guys like New York Observer not to misbehave in the first place.
Scott,
I see your point completely about the dual nature of RSS. It's a feed asking people to use it. It's the touchy area of the web, right? It's there, so people are going to take it.
I think this gets worse because of two reasons: 1) They have ads on their site and are presumably profiting from this, 2) how would they respond if we started simply aggregating their original posts and building a blog from them without permission?
I'm pretty sure we agree on this, but I just wanted to point out another few things for people who may not to consider.
Thanks Carl. I think PolitickerNV and a bunch of their other state sites had paid reporters on staff, but they were let go December 12.
Scott, the only thing a person could do on Feedburner is change to a partial feed for all. I can't even tell from the stats what reader they are using anyway.
Ryan, you know what is kind of funny. When I first clicked over to see my post being run there was a Travel Nevada, through Adwords, banner at the top.
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