Comments on: When is it OK to post someone else’s content?

By: Freelance Advice from the Blogosphere | Freelance Parent

Freelance Advice from the Blogosphere | Freelance Parent — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:44:27 +0000

[...] I have already found a couple of sites that are reprinting all or part of some of our posts here at Freelance Parent, and it annoys me quite a bit. My ire has nothing on Deb’s over at Freelance Writing Jobs. She’s gives a nice run-down on When Is It OK to Post Someone Else’s Content? [...]

By: Brandi R

Brandi R — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:01:20 +0000

Deb, I’m with you on the plagiarism, but I think your newspaper analogy is off. The equivalent would be: if I buy the paper, would I allow my friends to read it for free? Of course I would. That is the analogy that likely applies most to people who post RSS feeds for social networking groups.

By: Mariella

Mariella — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:09:53 +0000

Ah~ Thans for informing us, Deb. Now I know where you’re coming from.

By: Deb

Deb — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 08:43:15 +0000

Oh and guys, please don’t feed the trolls. It only encourages them. Thanks.

By: Deb

Deb — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 08:42:42 +0000

Let me clarify about the RSS/LiveJournal thing. It happened some time ago but it was just fed to one person’s blog with only a person or two seeing it, she started a travel writing page with over a hundred subscribers and was providing my feed as a way to help them find jobs.

It’s not like one person was reading a feed. The feed didn’t contain my ads either. After that I switched to a partial feed but once I switched to Wordpress, the full feed came back again.

By: Mariella

Mariella — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 07:48:03 +0000

@gia>> actually, i’m already acquainted with the LJ syndication because I’m an LJ user myself. It just so happens that I don’t use their RSS feed.

Yes, I meant THAT interest I’ll just comment on your blog so we can continue the convo there! ^0^/

——————————–

I have to say though, I have to take back what I said about feeds generating duplicate content (with regards to search engine spiders) because feeds don’t get crawled. I think I got confused too.

About that, I meant LJ RSS feeds. At least I think that’s the case, not sure though. But those published RSS feeds on public domains could be crawled by spiders, just thought I should clear what I said.

By: gia

gia — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 06:08:56 +0000

@Mariella:
Just to reiterate, a person who sets up a syndicated feed on LiveJournal– i.e. goes to http://livejournal.com/syn and puts in an RSS feed URL, which causes LiveJournal to create an account that pulls from the RSS feed directly –does NOT have access to edit or delete that account. If asked, LiveJournal staffers would have to remove it, and I’m sure they would.

As for to click or not to click…I myself rarely click through to a blog; when I do it’s because there’s additional content I want to access or I want to leave a comment. For me, it really makes no difference whether I’m reading it in my standalone RSS reader, my browser’s RSS reader, a LiveJournal syndicated feed, or any other method. But I’m sure everyone has their own habits.

But without hard numbers, I’m still skeptical that an RSS feed syndicated on X or Y blog site draws significantly more traffic away from the original site than having an RSS feed available, period. (You may have noticed that the syndicated version of Deb’s feed on LiveJournal only had one subscribed reader…)

Keep in mind, after all: an RSS feed is a tool that the blog writer can *choose* to make available to the public. So I find it hard to blame the public when it uses the tool however it wants to in the end…as long as they aren’t actively trying to take credit for my work, which as I’ve noted before would be very hard to do with LiveJournal’s syndication methods (though I’m sure there are other sites where it’s easier to be unscrupulous).

…Anyway. When you say “interest” I’m guessing you mean anime and manga? It’s been a hobby of mine for ages and I’ve been working on making it a career since I got my foot in the door with a job earlier this year (Unfortunately I was laid off– hence my being a full-time freelancer now!) Always nice to meet another fan ^_^

By: Mariella

Mariella — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 04:09:30 +0000

I hope you reported it to Live Journal too. On the first offense, I think the best tactic is to inform the person that they don’t have permission and ask them to remove the content. After that, I’d go to the admins of the site.

Reading all the comments, I think a lot of people got this whole thing confused. It’s not actually about plagiarism itself but the issue of RSS feeds “stealing” content (“stealing” is in quotes because it’s not really stealing per se). When people syndicate your blog, they don’t copy and paste the content to their web sites manually. If Deb would ask, perhaps LJ would tell the user to remove the feed, but they won’t see it as an offense because they’re the ones who included the feature to their web site in the first place.

@gia
Hi gia, It’s just my opinion, but if it were me reading LJ RSS feeds on a browser, that’s when I’ll get lazy to go to the actual web site (I speak from experience). Whereas if I were reading on stand-alone RSS readers, I’d feel compelled to surf over. But as I said, that’s just me.

I have to say though, I have to take back what I said about feeds generating duplicate content (with regards to search engine spiders) because feeds don’t get crawled. I think I got confused too.

BTW, nice meeting someone of the same interest, here, gia. I’ll comment on your blog later.

By: Micah

Micah — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 01:40:17 +0000

That’s not the point, and it’s rude to come to come here and say that. Stealing is stealing. That’s all there is to it.

By: Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 01:09:01 +0000

Deb’s writing is not that great (ever read her about.com page? good cure for insomnia), I can’t imagine anyone actually lifting her work. They must be new to the web.