Last October I put up a post about my abhorrence of sploggers.  This morning while making my usual rounds of checking on my blogs and search engine updates I found someone doing this with my Fall television post from a few weeks ago.

Here’s my original post: Fall 2009 TV Viewing Schedule

Here’s the splogger post (at start4all.com): Fall 2009 TV Viewing Schedule, Blue Shotgun, Indianapolis, Indiana

As you see, they run the posts through a plugin* (or other software) which changes the verbiage here and there to where it makes no sense but certain keywords will get picked up by Google and the other search engines.  Then they throw in Google AdSense and turn off the comments and have no way to contact them.  In some cases the sploggers will at least link back to your site (a.k.a. “source”), but that is not the case here.

The site behind this particular instance is start4all.com, which I’d never heard of before now.  I tried to contact them through their main page but it appears that the contact form isn’t working.  This appears to be some sort of hosted service running WordPress (probably WordPress MU from the looks of it).  So it’s hard to say with certainty who is behind this and I’d be surprised to get anywhere with pursing it.

Needless to say, this drives me batty and is a nuisance to bloggers everywhere. We don’t spend our time writing posts just for people to steal the content.  Most of us offer the content freely out of our passion for blogging and I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a little courtesy.  If you actually like a post, feel free to quote it and reference it on your own site and/or comment on the post. But please don’t try to claim it as your own (especially when you include the blog’s name and phone number). And this applies to Tweets & Podcasts as well, both of which I’ve had happen.

So what to do? In my case I’ll suffice with this post and hope to get a response from start4all.com. But I’ve seen other bloggers:

• Turn off their full RSS feeds. I’m not a fan of this option as it eliminates your RSS readers.
• Start throwing all sorts of advertising in your face. I have no problem with advertising and do it to some extent myself, but when you start adding pop-ups and other intrusive ads I’ll just go elsewhere.
• Start charging for membership to your blog. I have no problem with membership blogs if your blog is an appropriate candidate (specific subject with frequent valuable content).
• Stop blogging all together. This is the worst option, but one that I understand.

With that said, please share your stories and thoughts. And as always, feel free to leave a message for the podcast (voicemail number below).

* There are a handful of WordPress plugins out there with hefty price tags which do this sort of thing while claiming to automatically “create” content for you. DO NOT ask me what they are or where to get them.

In regards to blogging, if there’s one thing that drives me nuts (other than spam comments), it’s sploggers.  These people set up generic blogs, throw in Google AdSense and install a plugin that steals posts from your RSS feed and then publishes them as their own.  In some cases they link to your post, but that’s just as annoying in my opinion.

So tonight I found one such fool stealing my Twitter updates and had to leave a comment (because the coward has no contact info and didn’t even bother to remove the default “about” text and apparently doesn’t even approve *any* comments).

I’m not going to bother linking to their site as that would only encourage the behavior, but I’ll post my comment here:

Stop stealing my content and start writing your own posts! Sploggers like you are a cancer to the blogosphere.

And learn how to setup permalinks and update the “about” copy while you’re at it.

Am I out of line?  To me this is just totally redicilious.  I wish Google had some sort of policing in effect because you know that they can tell when there’s duplicate content. If they stoped paying these fools they’d have no reason to continue the practice.