Just recently I had written about Om Malik in Bloggers v/s Splogs and Scrappers and how he was upset at having his blog’s rss feeds used as content for another website, (without his permission of course). Although WebKeyDesign is not anywhere near as popular as Om Malik’s blog, I figure that sooner rather later I would also be splogged. I usually check for sites that link to WebKeyDesign once a week, just to see how my linking campaign for WKD is progressing and sure enough I spotted a real splog site with WKD’s content. Usually my own web stat programs pick up what I call a blog links site, this is what I call a site that just links a bunch of blogs based on a keyword, something similar to Technorati, but not as sophisticated or well intentioned either. But b-1st.com is not just displaying links to WKD, they are displaying the entire RSS feed. However, since my feeds do not contain my full content, but only a summary, not all of my content is being stolen, just summaries of it.
I am sure that there are some bloggers out there who believe in syndicating their full postings and having sites like this one really make those bloggers take pause. In my case I really would not mind the actual splogging much, but then I start thinking of the hosting costs involved with running WKD and at the same time the loss of third party revenue, and it does begin to bother me somewhat.
Over the weekend PlagiarismToday.com sent me a nice email informing me of this splog. If you are a blogger and are at all concerned about this issue, you can take a look at their site. I am not in any way affliated with PlagiarismToday.com.
In the case of b-1st.com, they have already angered another group of webmasters and eventually they may be taken down in the near future.
I am still somewhat undecided about splogs, and just what they mean for the average blogger. I suppose I would like to have Google, Yahoo, and MSNSearch, remove them from their indexes but I have a feeling that the big search engines themselves are still coming to grips with the issue as we speak.