SD Watch extends welcome to "a couple of new players in the South Dakota BlogOSphere." One of them, BlogNetNews.com/South_Dakota, isn't exactly local. The content is all local, but it's really just an aggregator, one of several put together by David Mastio of Chesapeake, Virginia. According to his Blogger profile, he's worked in newspapers and as a speechwriter for the GW Bush administration. The closest thing to a South Dakota connection is erstwhile employment for USA Today, which belongs to Eureka's favorite son Al Neuharth.
We all appreciate the attention. Perhaps BlogNetNews will help some out-of-staters navigate to the wit and wisdom of the South Dakota blogosphere. Maybe the increased traffic will bring us all the joy of more blog success than our servers can handle (again, our hearts go out to the all-too-popular PP). But there's no sign that the BlogNetNews aggregator will be contributing original content or anything else that we can't already get from our homegrown blogs. Plus, Mastio's math is a little off: the proprietary formula his "Influence Index" ranks the Madville Times above SD Watch. (Let's see, Todd should be retracting that welcome in 5, 4, 3,... ;-) )
Personally, I'd encourage bloggers not to participate in this new aggregator, it's commonly known in the blogging world as 'scrapping'. They're essentially stealing your and other blogger's content so they can make advertising revenue off of it. I don't see how that helps out the Madville Times at all...
ReplyDeleteThanks, Matt! That's the impression I got from it. I'll stick with my slogan: "Be a yokel -- blog local!"
ReplyDeleteMatthew,
ReplyDeleteScraping is taking whole posts and reprinting them.
BNN reprints the first 50 words and then links back twice to the original article.
And there is plenty we do that ads to the SD blogosphere. Here's one example: creating a South Dakota blogs search engine. (you can get it at the top of our SD page or host it on your own site from the widgets you find under "services" in our left sidebar.)