Online Travel Help Blog Just Not as Awesome as inFlightHQ
It’s come to our attention that the blog Online Travel Help just isn’t as awesome as InflightHQ. I’ve listed a number of reasons below:
- They’re not sponsored by Connexion.
- They’re big ugly copycats with nothing better to do than pirate original content from someone else’s blog and then add their own advertising.
- Gridskipper is way cooler because they blog about what others are blogging about without copying their posts.
- Their mother was a hamster and their father smells of elderberries.
But seriously folks, internet piracy of the kind that Online Travel Help is committing is just plain wrong. It’s one thing to use RSS aggregation software to aggregate news from lots of sites onto your blog, but it’s quite another to blatantly steal content from one other blog and then add your own advertising.
Fortunately, Byron found them and now we’re calling them out. This post will appear on their blog and I will take a screenshot and post it back here so the whole world can see how lame they are.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
You’re syndicating your feed via XML/RSS.
Isn’t that the point of doing so?
Not exactly. We syndicate our site so that our readers will know when we’ve updated - not so that somebody can steal our content and add their own advertising. That’s an abuse of the technology.
Reblogging as it’s called is an increasing problem for blogs. It happens everywhere, even in legitimate forms like Technorati and new services like Newsvine and Digg and why the Creative Commons was created. In summary, “Other people can copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify here.” So fair use applies and just creating a blog out of someone else’s blog is appealing for someone wanted to make money on ads, if you’re not fully attributing it with permission and sharing those profits, then no it’s not OK.
Hi. Google suggests that the ad money flows to http://www.zephyr-media.com. You might just send an email to the execs of Zephyr and let ‘em know how you feel about the commercial re-purposing of your content:
(ed note. removed the emails)
Thanks John. See my follow up post about Zombie Blogs.
Hmmm, looks like they noticed— no copy of this post appears on their site, so far as I could tell.
So clearly you need to put a “By the way, Online Travel Help is still stealing our content” in every second or third post. Or, heck, figure out which IP address they’re using to suck up your RSS and give them a specialized version of the feed!
Eric, you devious genius! Where have you been all my life?
Byron?
Eric,
Yep I noticed it and it maybe the explicit CC license I put in the RSS made a difference or their Zombie robot has been asleep. The first person to figure out a zombie zapper is going to be a blogosphere hero. If I had the technical chops, I’d zombie them back, in a recursive RSS manner. Alternatively, we go back to partial feeds. I’m going to try an IP thing, but that can easily be thwarted by moving IPs around (I think).
Leave a Comment