Hi there everybody!

So you are bound to read this after all. BTW, the headline says it all. If you still wanna read, be warned that you have been informed what this article contains. It isn’t as boring as it looks of course for one thing, I have written it. Remember that and you will happily read through the rest of this article. Ok, Ok, I am coming to the topic of today’s article. There’s something that I came across today about something called “Splogs”. Now you must be wondering these could be some new kinda blog, right? Well, wrong. This should have been called Splog Trek: The next Generation. Wonder why? Well the reason is these guys have brought spamming to the next level. Well, it isn’t exactly spamming in the right sense (or the wrong sense, no pun intended! ) but what else can somebody call something like it. Picture this, you right an article and post it to your blog (Well not many of us DO right articles, unless you call explaining how you wash your undergarments an article!) and then provide people with RSS (Real Simple Syndication Stupid!) feeds to them. This you do out of generosity (or out of the compulsion of having an integrated RSS Feeds provider in your blog software. Either way you are doing it). Now some no-gooder individual or website (e.g, ) comes along or sends a bot to feed on your RSS, source content from your blog put some shiney packaging material (ads included) and make it available on their own website! Talk about stealing. Creative Commons deed or not, they just don’t care. They throw all the norms to the wind and make hay while the sun shines (Remember the ADS that pay them instead of you!).

Well that’s part one, Splog defined. Now on to the next part. What should we do to stop or prevent this? Well, I found out about a plugin called AntiLeech by Owen Winkler (http://asymptomatic.org) which can be found at RedAlt.
If you are interested to know about the Bitacle.org splogger website and what they have done to the blogging community, blogger Laurelle has written an interesting article highlighting the wrongs done to us. This is what she had to say in the article:

When bitacle.org hit the splogways last year, scrapping content through feeds to fill their “search engine database”, there was a minor flurry over it. Recently, after several top notch and big mouth bloggers discovered they were still at it, grabbing full content feeds from blogs and sticking ads into the content — trust me, hell hath no fury greater than a ripped off blogger.

Now, further in the article she explains steps to fight these splogs especially, Bitacle.org. I’m sure you’ll like it.

For those of you who are new to this concept or who want to identify splogs from blogs, here is another article by Laurelle which will guide you in doing just that. I hope you will find them good. Make sure you install the AntiLeech plugin on your WordPress powered blog. As for those of you who have your blogs on WordPress.com, they are already working on fighting this problem. So keep your eyes, ears and blog open for this and spread the word. Remember your blog is your voice. Speak up about this problem and that will increase the awareness amongst the blogging community about such drastic violations of our copyrights (or lefts whatever it may be).

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