A YouTube video about Web 2.0 by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University.
I usually don’t include YouTube videos here. I usually put them on my TumbleLog. But this one was good enough to share.
Watch carefully, think, and enjoy.
I’m vague about locations for a reason.
One of the great things about exploring remote desert locations is that they’re seldom visited by others. And the fewer people who visit an interesting destination, the fewer people have the opportunity to vandalize it.
I’ve seen the results of vandalism firsthand.
These are only a few of the things I’ve seen destroyed, lost forever. I don’t want to be responsible — even indirectly — for the loss of any others.
Many times when I write about places that are hidden away in the desert, I’m vague about their whereabouts. I know that I won’t damage them. And I know that the people I bring there won’t damage them. But who’s to say what people who get directions or GPS coordinates on the Web will do?
Just today, my friend Ray and I were talking about ATVers exploring all the old mine sites. They come up from Phoenix with their fancy quads, following directions they’ve found on the Web to places like Anderson Mill and Gold Bar Mine. Most of them are respectful of these remnants of our past. But it only takes one with a bad attitude to destroy fragile ruins.
And sadly, there are more than one of these people out there.
Four more pingbacks from feedscrapers today!
After writing my two splogging-related posts this morning, I went for a flight with some clients. Just got back a while ago. And what do I find in my e-mail inbox? Four more splog pingbacks!
I also found a message from Jim Mitchell, responding to an e-mail I’d sent him earlier in the day. He included a link to a blog post on MaxPower that provides two good methods for stopping AdSense sploggers. I’m going through it now. But the thing I wanted to share was this explanation of what splogging is, for those of you who have no idea what I’ve been whining about all day.
From Stopping Adsense Splogs & Spammers: Methods that Work on MaxPower:
Imagine searching for something or other on the Internet and arriving at a webpage chocked full of ads and stuffed with the exact keyword you were searching for. The page is of no help because it contains no content of value. Some guy somewhere, created a website that sucks keywords / newstories / content from other websites using RSS, inserted the right keywords to maximize profit from Adsense, and waited for Google to index and rank it high enough for you stumble upon it. Once at the page, the spammer (or spamdexer) hopes that you will click on one of the Adsense ads that seem helpful compared to the rest of the useless random text. This practice of spamdexing wastes your time, its annoying, and you can fight back.
If you’ve seen this on your blog, follow the above link to the MaxPower article to see what you can do about it.
A follow-up to my “Google, Adsense, and Splogging” post.
Moments after publishing my post about sploggers making money with AdSense, I got three pingbacks from a splogger’s site. I visited the site and saw an AdSense ad block at the top of the page.
Talk about timing!
I went to Google’s site and looked up the info to report violations. I found “Google AdSense Help Center: How do I report a policy violation?“:
How do I report a policy violation?
We regularly review sites in our program for compliance with our program policies. If you notice a site displaying Google ads that you believe is violating our program policies, please let us know and we can investigate the issue further.
The page then goes on to provide instructions making it clear how to report the problem.
Everyone reading this: please use this information to report sites that are scraping your feeds to generate content for their sites. The more we report this, the more likely Google will do something to prevent these people from getting AdSense accounts in the first place. Then maybe — just maybe — this feed scraping will stop.
Reports of cancelled accounts while sploggers earn money by scraping honest bloggers’ content is troubling.
Jim Mitchell lost his AdSense account and Google won’t tell him why. He’s bitter about it. But what makes him more bitter is that he’s discovered that sploggers with AdSense accounts have been using his content to earn revenue.
From Is Google AdSense Really Fair? on JimMitchell.org:
Today, I found four different sites that have scraped my content to use as their own with AdSense ads on the page. This, according to the Google AdSense Terms of Service, is a huge violation. I promptly reported the abuse with hopes the sploggers who lifted my content get their income generating plug pulled pronto.
One of the commenters to Jim’s post claims his AdSense account was also cancelled for no reason.
Now I’ve had no trouble with Google or AdSense and hope I never do. My earnings are meager, but they do cover the cost of hosting, which is my primary goal for including AdSense ads on this site. (That’s one of the reasons I don’t plaster the site with advertising like so many other bloggers do.)
But I do have a serious problem with sploggers, especially if they’re using AdSense or other advertising programs to earn money by illegally using the content written by other bloggers.
I know my content is scraped. Every once in a while, I’ll get a pingback from a sloppy splogger that directs me to his site. The site is full of scraped content and not much else. Most of the ones I’ve seen seem to be link farms for some other purpose. I don’t know enough about this stuff to understand why my content is being scraped when there doesn’t appear to be ads on the site my content is appearing on. (Perhaps someone reading this can explain or include a link to a good explanation.) But if these sloppy sploggers are stealing content in a way that can be easily traced, how many other sploggers are stealing content in a way that can’t be easily traced?
And do they all have Google AdSense accounts?
Which brings up a good question: how does Google determine who qualifies for an AdSense account? Is there a human who actually looks at the sites? I seriously doubt that. So that makes me wonder how effective their software is at determining whether a site is legitimate — full of fresh, legally obtained content — or a ripoff of other bloggers’ hard work.
And that also brings up the question of the effectiveness of an Adwords account. I was using Adwords for Flying M Air in an effort to sell my multi-day excursions. While I’m no Adwords expert, I think I had it set up well. I know I was paying for a ton of hits. But I also know that my phone didn’t ring. While this might mean that people don’t want the service I’m offering — chances are, they get sticker shock out when they see the price — it also might mean that the clicks aren’t being made by serious customers — or even by humans.
But it also means that my Adwords payments might be going to sploggers who have built sites to draw in visitors who then click on my link. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if they were buying — one sale would pay my Adwords bill for a year — but they’re not. So I could be paying, through my Adwords account, for sploggers to steal content from honest bloggers, some of whom, according to Jim Mitchell, have had their AdSense accounts yanked for reasons never explained.
I guess what I want to know is this:
I hope Jim gets his AdSense account back. And I hope that other bloggers do their best to report feed scraping and splogging activities to Google or other ad sourcers whenever it’s found.