Planet Aggregator or Splog
Posted by Moses on Feb 17, 2007
I discovered the world of splogging approximately 1 week ago. During my regular log review, I realized that my article, Joining the Open Source Tidal Wave: Part 2, had been stolen by another website. I was able to tell because the image referenced in the site was being called by the other website.
As I wrote in an earlier post, I was at first surprised and then dumbfounded as to what to do next. Despite living in a world of spyware, malware, viruses and other threats, I naively expected that blogging would be relatively safe from criminals. I mean who wants to steal a bunch of articles about mom’s home made pie. 
Of course, I quickly discovered through some quick and dirty googling that splogs and splogging are a relatively new and growing problem in the blogosphere.
For those of you who are new to splogging here is a quick introduction. Splogs are websites where criminals place content stolen from the RSS feeds of other blogs without the permission of the authors. These criminals place ads on these new aggregated sites and create an instant money making machine. There is a huge debate in the blogosphere of what to do about these criminal some bloggers feel like going after each site is a waste of time and others feel like it’s necessary to draw a line in the sand and say no more. You can read more about the debate here.
In the course of my research, I also discovered Planets, which are legitimate aggregators of content. Planets are aggregation sites where the content is aggregated via RSS feeds and Planet software. The Planet web feed aggregator software is FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) maintained by Jeff Waugh and Scott James Remnant. Sites that use the Planet software often contain the word Planet in their name such as Planet GNOME.
Although Planet aggregators are benign and beneficial its clear that the Planet software or software like it is being used by criminals to steal original content from many bloggers. In my case, the first site to steal my Joining the Open Source Tidal Wave: Part Article, was titled Planet Fedora XXX (I see no need to send more people to that site or to legitimize it by providing it with a link from my blog). The criminal operating the splog was masquerading the site as a legitimate Planet.
How do you know if your content has been misappropriated by a splogger or was simply included in a legitimate Planet?
Here’s the difference between a Splog and a Planet.
Splog:
- Steals content with no notice to the original author
- Does not provide a means of contact to contact the site owner (often the contact and about pages are broken links)
- There is no means to remove your site from the splog…errr Planet
Planet:
- Author is notified if they are automatically included in the Planet (this should rarely occur)
- There is a way to get in contact with operator of the Planet
- There is a straight forward way to have your site removed/added from/to the Planet
Often splogs masquerade as legitimate blogs, but still steal content such as the latest site to steal my now oft stolen Joining the Open Source Tidal Wave: Part 2. Even though it looks like a blog, it will have the same characteristics of a splog mentioned earlier.
How do you fight sploggers? Well, if you want to fight back Lorelle’s article is the most detailed I’ve seen for how to go after sploggers. If you want to prevent your articles from being stolen bookmark or subscribe to this site because I’ll be back with an article that explains the steps I’ve taken to prevent sploggers from stealing my content. Of course, like any contest the tools to steal content and prevent it from being stolen will continue to evolve.
Update
Since posting this article I’ve found some additional resources that may help you identify splogs.
Tags: blog, blogging, open source, software, splog, splogger, splogging, technology
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5 Free Tools to Track the Success of Your Blog
Posted by Moses on Feb 16, 2007
The success of your blog or website is determined entirely by your readership. If visitors come to your site and leave immediately or leave after reading one article you’ve lost the opportunity to expand your regular readership, increase the influence of your message and earn more revenue. The goal of almost every blog is to develop a loyal following of visitors who read and stay on the site everyday.
Of course if you want to be successful blogging, you need to understand why you want to build a loyal following of visitors. If it is simply to make money, you may find that this is insufficient motivation to keep you focused on doing the hard work that build a loyal readership and consequently a successful blog. Steve Pavlina’s article How Selfish Are You? is a good introduction to begin defining why you engage in some of your activities.
Because bloggers and webmasters look at their sites all of the time they are often unable to identify the necessary tweaks and changes that would make their site easier to use by an unfamiliar audience. Often times friends and family want to sugarcoat their evaluations making it especially difficult to get an objective assessments.
The only way to know objectively how well you site is doing it to look at the numbers. In web parlance the numbers are located in your web servers logs. The logs of most web servers capture all types of information about your visitors such as the type of operating system used, pages clicked on, pages where they left to go to another site. Until recently it’s been beyond the average bloggers ability to review logs on a regular basis. Here are some free tools that will help you understand how you’re visitors use your site.
Your hosting Provider’s Control Panel – Let’s start at home first. Your hosting provider probably offers a nice and easy control panel such as CPanel, to manage your slice of the web server where your blog resides. Often the control panel listens on another port like www.yourblog.com:2050. Most control panels include a statistics or logging section that include powerful tools to build graphical reports about your blogs activity. These tools are typically updated once a day. That means that once a day the logs are read by the tool and a new report is generated. Most of these tools are open source, which is why your provider can afford to offer them with your low priced hosting package. For example, my provider offers Webalizer and Awstats. I review each daily. Often their numbers do not exactly match because some of the information presented is interpreted, meaning that 2 pieces of data are analyzed together to come to a conclusion and the 2 tools do not agree on the conclusion. However, together I get a pretty good idea of how my site is performing.
Google Analytics - Google offers an amazing alternative to your providers offering. Google Analytics is a comprehensive reporting and analysis tool that helps you understand how your visitors interact with your blog and what parts of the blog are generating revenue for you. It will allow you to establish monetary goals for different parts of your blog. I believe you have to be enrolled in Google Adsense to use the conversion tools to help you monetize your blog. Because of the interactive nature of the site (it uses AJAX) to drive the interface you are able to generate ad-hoc queries which is something not offered in versions of tools offered by most providers. I’m still learning more about the reporting power offered by Google Analytics, but I recommend that anyone with a blog or website check it out.
Feedburner – Feedburner makes the list because it offers you the ability to determine the number of visitors hitting or subscribing to you feed in a given day. This is extremely useful in determining the number of regular visitors you have to your site. It takes a relatively large amount of effort for someone to view a site and subscribe to an RSS feed. Of course with technologies like Live Bookmarks in Firefox and IE7 it’s a lot easier. Fortunately, Feedburner tracks those as well.
Alexa – Alexa provides traffic ranking for your site. The hitch here is that your blog has to rank in the top 100,000 of sites for it to be included. I’m not quite there yet according to Technorati, Three Sticks currently is in the top 340,000 of sites. That’s not bad considering it was in the top 1.7 million of sites just 3 weeks prior to me writing this article.
URLTrends – URLTrends is an aggregator of different site statistics from Google, Yahoo and others. It is useful for understanding how your blog ranks against others.
Tags: blog, blogging, Google, log, open source, review, software, statistics, technology, traffic
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