RSS Scraping – Plagiarism – and Really, Who is Jeff Crouere

I’ve been trying to build up my blog traffic.  There are a million articles out there on how to get more hits, how to get your Google index ration optimized, and your ranking high on all the right spots…it’s frightening, confusing, and a time sink of astronomical proportion.

Yesterday I was checking my blog at Technorati.com.  This is a site where you can claim your blog as your own and, through some dashboards and tools they provide, you can check how many people link back to your posts, how many people choose to “favorite” you – become your fan, and a lot of other things.  One thing you get is “Authority,” which is a score you build by having more people link back to your content.

On my list of 11 Authority links, I found this site: 2008USAPresidents

On this site, attributed to a guy named Jeff Crouere, was a snippet of one of my recent posts.  Apparently what this site does is to scrape text off of web pages and auto-post them into a blog.  It searches (I think) for stories about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – which is how I ended up with a snippet there…but what pissed me off was, though it links back to HERE – it says this other guy said it.

So I Googled him (what else was I to do?)  Turns out Mr. Crouere is a radio personality with his own political website:   RINGSIDE POLITICS

My bet is he’s as unaware that he said the words that *I* actually said as I was supposed to be of the plagiarism.

Really, people, here’s the thing.  You can use crap like this to build up a billion hits.  You can put ads on the site and try to convince people to click them, and then go to Ad Sense or one of those sites and get paid for all the click throughs.  Why?  It can’t be enough to be worth the trouble involved in getting it all up and going…or the chance of someone like me kicking your ass when I hear you bragging about doing it in a bar some day.

Plagiarism is plagiarism.  The words I write are mine – it’s what I do for a living.  You want to quote me, attribute the quote properly.  Fix you freaking rss scraping crap program to put the right name with the post…or better yet…scrape someone else’s blog.

I found interesting links for those who’d like to know more about RSS Scraping.  It originally served a more noble cause.  It allowed you to take static websites that didn’t have an RSS feed, but did have content you wanted to follow, and create your own “scrape” of the text, which you could convert to a feed.  That’s pretty cool.  When it became an Internet auto-thief, not so much.  There are some ways to protect yourself, but most of them kill your own rankings and indexing, so they aren’t great ideas.

You can read more at:

Tutorial on RSS Feed Programs 

 Internet News Article

Article about Internet Plagiarism via Scrapes 

SO….if you are out there cruising around and looking at political commentary by Jeff Crouere and find yourself HERE… it’s not my fault.

–DNW