When Scarfing Content Bites Back
by
Brett Bumeter
Bloggers have been plagued for quite sometime when people come around and steal their content, posting it as their own on a different site.
Well there’s a new trend for scarfing content that is probably legal and possibly even helpful for bloggers. But can result in some funny consequences.
The concept is that instead of ripping off an entire article, a topical website will keep a Google news or blog search running. Every time an article comes up that mentions a keyword, the program will pull the excerpt from the original blog and post that excerpt in a new article on the topical blog.
As an example, here is a cosmetic surgery site. I wrote a ludicrous article on a satire blog (this is how I beat writers block) called The Viral Grape Vine. This article was about the crazy concept of Barack Obama having an affair with Hillary Clinton.
In the article I mention within a fake salicious quote the word Botox and this resulted in the cosmetic site picking the quote up and publishing it! Little did they know that the botox reference was inappropriate in nature, because they are not real people publishing the excerpt!
So for everyone out there that wants to run some automated content through their site, you might think twice before you do that!
If you own this site and happen across this, good try, sorry to screw up your system, let me buy you a drink at Paris Las Vegas if you go to Blogworld this year.
PS No I do not know what program they are running.
This truly is an interesting new concept.
Thanks great. You’ve got to write a whole series.
It is interesting, but I’m not sure of the application or results.
As to the series, I think this could have both some useful perspectives as well as some additional funny results.