Deep Sea News : Leech Notice

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Craig is temporarily a post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who is looking for a permanent position. He spends most of his time balancing his overwhelming geekdom with normalcy so he can function in the real world. Luckily his wife likes his geekiness.

Peter Etnoyer is a Graduate Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He studies deep corals and ocean fronts, and he loves to be on the water.

Kevin Zelnio is a Graduate Student Researcher at Penn State studying the ecology of hydrothermal vent and methane seep communities. He raises awareness of the plight of the spineless through folk music.

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Leech Notice

Category: Ramblings
Posted on: June 15, 2007 6:18 PM, by CR McClain

This blog is a considerable amount of hard work on our part requiring dedication and time. Sometimes people recognize this spreading the link love. Other times someone outright thieves our content. This time it is New York Articles that proudly claims "This site collects content from another sites".

If you're reading this post at New York Articles rather than at my actual site, you are partaking of a suboptimal experience on a poorly designed website from someone who doesn't #$%@ about the deep sea and oceans.

I'm not going to give you the URL for the lesser, because there is no value-added to speak of, unless you count the pennies that come in to the leech that grabs the RSS and sells the Google Ads.

Does such a site do anything to improve an already crowded blogosphere? Does anyone treat a sloppy feed aggregating site of this sort as a regular destination (or really, as anything but an accidental destination)?

Pathetic.

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Comments

How about serving a different feed to that aggregator than to the rest? For the content, just let your imagination run wild. You have all kinds of options, ranging from goatse, to fake, made up, wildly implausible deep-sea "news" likely involving tentacles and Japanese-style female cartoon characters, to boring but safer repeated assertions about the site owners actions, parentage and moral character.

Or - my favorite - hit Gutenbooks, get "Origin of Species" and set that as the top feed post for him. All of the book. For extra credit, grab "Descent of Man", "Ulysses" and "Beowulf" (in original - no boring translations) and set for older entries.

Posted by: Janne | June 15, 2007 7:35 PM

In a related vein, I came up with this replacement image for hotlinkers sucking bandwidth from my site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cephalopodcast/482170227/

Posted by: Jason | June 15, 2007 8:03 PM

I've heard this kind of complaint from other Web logs too, but I don't understand it. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." The purpose of posting an RSS feed is to allow others to syndicate your content. That means republishing it on multiple Web sites, much like a syndicated comic strip that appears in multiple newspapers. If you don't want your Web log to be syndicated, then why do you post an RSS feed?

It seems like setting up a pile of firewood next to the road with a sign saying "FREE WOOD" and then complaining that people are stealing your wood, oh what evil people they are, how pathetic, let's figure out how to get revenge on them, and so on. As long as the sign is posted, then that kind of "theft" is entirely predictable and entirely the responsibility of the person who posted the sign.

I read Deep Sea News through syndication on Livejournal myself - the system reads your posted RSS file and displays it on my friends list. That makes the difference between my reading DSN at all and not doing so, because the additional work in visiting a separate site every day just to read DSN would be enough that I wouldn't actually do it; having the aggregator allows me to read the postings from many sites at once. Do you consider my reading of DSN abusive? Do you want me to stop reading DSN?

Posted by: Matthew Skala | June 17, 2007 5:56 AM

Perhaps you should not use scienceblogs as a host since you disagree with the RSS feed availability

Posted by: Marja | June 17, 2007 9:31 AM

Perhaps Matthew and Marja misunderstood the problem. The RSS feed allows readers like yourself to access the content through more convenient methods. Obviously, I have no problem with this. The problem lies in the fact that the whole post is plagiarized on another site, without any original content, for profit. Not for the reader but so someone can make a dime off someone else's hard work. I never said anything against RSS feeds. Of coarse, there is also no need for oversimplification of the issue i.e. chose not to have RSS or not or leave Sb because they use an RSS. This is not a black or white issue but rather an assessment of weakness of RSS.

Posted by: CR McClain | June 17, 2007 10:15 AM

In school this would be considered plagarism pure and simple! I personally bookmarked this site and go to it 2-3 times a week, at least.

Posted by: Blondie | June 20, 2007 4:55 AM

Hi Craig,

I'm confused, are you upset because you are not being credited properly for your work? Or, because another site is generating hits based on your work? i.e. people aren't coming to this site to read the posts and hence underestimating your potential readership and underestimating site statistics. Or is it both?

I am all for free information exchange on the internet so long as I get credited properly for my work. If another site wants to display my writing, along with my name, that is fine. The issue becomes then knowing where you are being read and the reach and effect of your work. There needs to be a good way of being able to track you work, like assigning an ID to it like a DOI. A blog post can get linked to the DOI permanently and you can use a search engine to or some other technology to see everything linked to that DOI. Then you can track the history of every digital article/blog piece etc.

Posted by: kevin zelnio | June 20, 2007 6:37 AM

FYI - the nyarticles.com site is now serving up popups from a .tr domain, so I would highly advise against visiting that site without adequate popup and virus protection. I've emailed the scienceblogs.com webmaster to see if he can block their domain and IPs.

Posted by: Mr. Gunn | December 7, 2007 9:21 AM