This post, "Grow Spot & Plagiarism ~Help from Cold Climate Kathy", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.
Thank you all for your responses to the previous post about the Grow Spot's use of our writing and photos on their site. Here's a link from Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardens giving some advice on protecting your RSS feed from plagiarism. This is from her Blog Coach site.
Mr Brown Thumb wrote a new post on How To Shorten Your Feed.
Thank you both!
I see that Mr. Brown Thumb has wisely returned to his regular programming - that's what I'll do in the next post.
About Me
- Annie in Austin
- Welcome! As "Annie in Austin" I blog about gardening in Austin, TX with occasional looks back at our former gardens in Illinois. My husband Philo & I also make videos - some use garden images as background for my original songs, some capture Austin events & sometimes we share videos of birds in our garden. Come talk about gardens, movies, music, genealogy and Austin at the Transplantable Rose and listen to my original songs on YouTube. For an overview read Three Gardens, Twenty Years. Unless noted, these words and photos are my copyrighted work.
Showing posts with label Content theft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Content theft. Show all posts
Monday, December 10, 2007
Friday, December 07, 2007
Tired Of Sharecropping for TheGrowSpot.com
This post, "Tired of Sharecropping for TheGrowSpot", was written for my blogspot blog, The Transplantable Rose, by Annie in Austin. - Edited Friday night, 12/ 7/ 2007 with more information added at the bottom of this post.
Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening recently asked why there are so few older garden bloggers, with ‘older’ defined as over 70, close in age to her parents. In the course of this lively discussion a similar question was raised – where are the younger garden bloggers? To answer that question I added a comment that listed some garden bloggers who’d spoken about being under 35. I have those bloggers linked in my sidebar.
I was quite happy to tell people about those young garden bloggers and give them links, but I’m not happy to tell you about another young woman with a garden blog, the so-called “grow spot” – and I’m not giving her a link, because the garden blog she has is not her garden blog… it’s mine, and it’s Kim/BlackswampGirl’s Study in Contrasts garden blog, and it’s Kerri’s Colors of the Garden and Don’s Iowa Garden and Yolanda Elizabet’s Bliss Garden, Colin and Carol’s Mediterranean Garden, Green Thumb’s India Garden, Nicole’s Caribbean Garden, Deviant Deziner’s Garden Porn, Dawn’s Suburban Wildlife Garden, Sylvana’s Obsessive Gardener… and a lot more. At this site, our posts appear on a neutral background and the site uses the photos we have taken, reproduces our words, and gives the unlinked names of our blogs - but you have to read the whole page and then click ‘more’ to go to the bottom of another page before you find a link to the actual blog. Our sidebar links, icons, buttons, tags, archives, etc. do not appear, so when read at this heavily promoted site our posts are disconnected from the page we have made.
There’s a comment forum for signed-in members, and it appears that the commenters assume they are speaking directly to the authors. But I don’t think the real authors will get to read these comments unless they’re signed in at the forum, and I haven’t seen any answers from the actual authors on the forums.
Colin and Carol – do you know there are comments on your roadkill post at this grow spot site? Don in Iowa, did you know there’s a comment on your “In Praise of Disorder” post?
Maybe you do already know about this, and maybe some of you are okay with it… but I’m not okay with someone using my work to raise the number of hits, ride piggyback on my page rank and prevent readers from talking directly to me. We genuine authors sweat blood over our posts while this chick swipes someone else’s work, stuffs it into her little gated community and demands that readers sign up to get inside.
The garden bloggers that I know can tell you about their experiences and experiments in every kind of gardening, and we've become a large and loosely organized community. TheGrowSpot. com bills itself as "a gardening community with forums on Urban Gardening, Organic Gardening, Growing to Eat, and more. The Grow Spot is also resource for information on all sorts of garden plants, flowers, trees and all things that grow. No green thumb required!" How can a few individuals who reuse posts be considered a community? They have taken the content of real gardeners in order to repost it on their pages, plunking in their ads next to our words and images. And in the end, those ads, perhaps for products that we totally hate or object to, are the reason for the existence of the Grow Spot.
We real garden bloggers write about all sorts of garden plants, flowers, trees and all thinks that grow. But instead of saying “No green thumb required”, as does this scraper site, we say “Grow things and your thumb will turn green!” as you gain in experience.
I am also not happy with the person who apparently runs this Grow Spot [it’s smushed into one word with the and dot com added – if you want to see it, go ahead, but I’m not helping!]. She shows up as a 33-year old woman named LUBA SPICHKIN from Santa Monica, California. She wears size 7 shoes and likes music by the late Elliot Smith, And who knows – maybe she's some kind of a gardener, but not a genuine one. Instead of hoeing her own row, she looks for other gardeners who are weeding and planting their plots, then rushes in from behind, jumps on their backs, steps on their shoulders to reach over and grabs the harvest from the true gardeners’ hands.
And she’s just one of a hoard of bottom feeders. I feel sick at what has happened to many of the stolen and reblogged Garden Bloggers Book Club posts about Eleanor Perenyi and Green Thoughts… some of them link to porn.
Take a representative phrase out of one of your own posts and use an exact search to see what happens – you may have written those words but will you get credit? Your site may come up in the middle of the page and clicking on your words as reblogged by other sites may trigger the installation of spyware or worse.
I think this post will go out on the feed in its full size, but as bloggers like Carol of May Dreams have advised me to do, the next garden post will probably be in the preview size. I know it’s not convenient for some of you, but the barbarians are at the gates and since I don’t have a moat, the least I can do is take up the welcome mat.
[Many heartfelt thanks for technical assistance and editing advice go to the wonderful Mr Brown Thumb, who has opened my eyes to more than plants.
Edited, Friday night: Mr Brown Thumb has posted to explain the technical aspects of scraping and RSS feeds. Read this post and you'll understand why the arguments of the growspot owner are a smoke screen for what is really happening].
This post, "Tired of Sharecropping for TheGrowSpot", was written for my blogspot blog, The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.
Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening recently asked why there are so few older garden bloggers, with ‘older’ defined as over 70, close in age to her parents. In the course of this lively discussion a similar question was raised – where are the younger garden bloggers? To answer that question I added a comment that listed some garden bloggers who’d spoken about being under 35. I have those bloggers linked in my sidebar.
I was quite happy to tell people about those young garden bloggers and give them links, but I’m not happy to tell you about another young woman with a garden blog, the so-called “grow spot” – and I’m not giving her a link, because the garden blog she has is not her garden blog… it’s mine, and it’s Kim/BlackswampGirl’s Study in Contrasts garden blog, and it’s Kerri’s Colors of the Garden and Don’s Iowa Garden and Yolanda Elizabet’s Bliss Garden, Colin and Carol’s Mediterranean Garden, Green Thumb’s India Garden, Nicole’s Caribbean Garden, Deviant Deziner’s Garden Porn, Dawn’s Suburban Wildlife Garden, Sylvana’s Obsessive Gardener… and a lot more. At this site, our posts appear on a neutral background and the site uses the photos we have taken, reproduces our words, and gives the unlinked names of our blogs - but you have to read the whole page and then click ‘more’ to go to the bottom of another page before you find a link to the actual blog. Our sidebar links, icons, buttons, tags, archives, etc. do not appear, so when read at this heavily promoted site our posts are disconnected from the page we have made.
There’s a comment forum for signed-in members, and it appears that the commenters assume they are speaking directly to the authors. But I don’t think the real authors will get to read these comments unless they’re signed in at the forum, and I haven’t seen any answers from the actual authors on the forums.
Colin and Carol – do you know there are comments on your roadkill post at this grow spot site? Don in Iowa, did you know there’s a comment on your “In Praise of Disorder” post?
Maybe you do already know about this, and maybe some of you are okay with it… but I’m not okay with someone using my work to raise the number of hits, ride piggyback on my page rank and prevent readers from talking directly to me. We genuine authors sweat blood over our posts while this chick swipes someone else’s work, stuffs it into her little gated community and demands that readers sign up to get inside.
The garden bloggers that I know can tell you about their experiences and experiments in every kind of gardening, and we've become a large and loosely organized community. TheGrowSpot. com bills itself as "a gardening community with forums on Urban Gardening, Organic Gardening, Growing to Eat, and more. The Grow Spot is also resource for information on all sorts of garden plants, flowers, trees and all things that grow. No green thumb required!" How can a few individuals who reuse posts be considered a community? They have taken the content of real gardeners in order to repost it on their pages, plunking in their ads next to our words and images. And in the end, those ads, perhaps for products that we totally hate or object to, are the reason for the existence of the Grow Spot.
We real garden bloggers write about all sorts of garden plants, flowers, trees and all thinks that grow. But instead of saying “No green thumb required”, as does this scraper site, we say “Grow things and your thumb will turn green!” as you gain in experience.
I am also not happy with the person who apparently runs this Grow Spot [it’s smushed into one word with the and dot com added – if you want to see it, go ahead, but I’m not helping!]. She shows up as a 33-year old woman named LUBA SPICHKIN from Santa Monica, California. She wears size 7 shoes and likes music by the late Elliot Smith, And who knows – maybe she's some kind of a gardener, but not a genuine one. Instead of hoeing her own row, she looks for other gardeners who are weeding and planting their plots, then rushes in from behind, jumps on their backs, steps on their shoulders to reach over and grabs the harvest from the true gardeners’ hands.
And she’s just one of a hoard of bottom feeders. I feel sick at what has happened to many of the stolen and reblogged Garden Bloggers Book Club posts about Eleanor Perenyi and Green Thoughts… some of them link to porn.
Take a representative phrase out of one of your own posts and use an exact search to see what happens – you may have written those words but will you get credit? Your site may come up in the middle of the page and clicking on your words as reblogged by other sites may trigger the installation of spyware or worse.
I think this post will go out on the feed in its full size, but as bloggers like Carol of May Dreams have advised me to do, the next garden post will probably be in the preview size. I know it’s not convenient for some of you, but the barbarians are at the gates and since I don’t have a moat, the least I can do is take up the welcome mat.
[Many heartfelt thanks for technical assistance and editing advice go to the wonderful Mr Brown Thumb, who has opened my eyes to more than plants.
Edited, Friday night: Mr Brown Thumb has posted to explain the technical aspects of scraping and RSS feeds. Read this post and you'll understand why the arguments of the growspot owner are a smoke screen for what is really happening].
This post, "Tired of Sharecropping for TheGrowSpot", was written for my blogspot blog, The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Someone Is Stealing My Content and Words
I know that stealing blog content goes on all the time, but I'm still hopping mad that my words are being stolen.
A thief by the name of Kosartheg is reblogging my articles, including those called "Directed by Duplass", "The Evolution of the Veranda", "Decisions Were Made", "Wish For A Walk", "Not Zanthan's Mystery Weed", "Destiny or Delusion", "Enjoying the Evergreens", "The Essential Earthman", "Read All About It", "Rain", "Living It Up In South Austin", "In Transition", "Luke, Mike and Idiocracy", "Calling Garden Prodigy", "Is My Name Fred" .... and so on - without my name, Annie in Austin, or the name of my blog , The Transplantable Rose, or any links back to the author - just outright clip, paste and steal.
The BLOGGING THIEF is using WordPress and has the title DuskDiary. The comments don't work, and it appears that I need a WordPress account to flag this blog. The Flying Monkeys are still on Spring Break, so until one of my wonderful friends in the blogosphere helps me notify WordPress:
This is to advise you, Kosartheg, that you are using copyrighted and protected material on your website/blog. Your illegal use of All the above listed articles at DuskDiary are originally from my website/blog called The Transplantable Rose at the address annieinaustin dot blogspot dot com. This is original content and I am the author and copyright holder. Use of copyright protected material without permission is illegal under copyright laws.
Please take one or more of the following actions immediately:
Re-write the post to include excerpts with a link to the original content.
Credit the material specifically to me, as author, and my website The Transplantable Rose.
Remove the plagiarized material immediately.
I expect a response within 5 days to this issue. Thank you for your immediate action on this matter. Annie in Austin
If you're just arriving at this post, please read the comments. The theft of posts from my garden blog is just one just a small part of a larger problem, and the commenters have a lot to say.
March 26th
Another user has reblogged my stuff again. This time it's at a different WordPress site under the aegis of financehelpblogdotcom which is not cooperating in letting me report the stolen posts. The user is kingarthur11460. If you are watching out for reblogging of your own content, financehelpblogdotcom may be a place to look.
Why have the stolen blogs all been reblogged under WordPress? Is there something about WordPress that is making it attractive and easy to use for spammers and thieves? But the stolen content is mainly from Blogger blogs. There are no answers, yet - just more questions.
A thief by the name of Kosartheg is reblogging my articles, including those called "Directed by Duplass", "The Evolution of the Veranda", "Decisions Were Made", "Wish For A Walk", "Not Zanthan's Mystery Weed", "Destiny or Delusion", "Enjoying the Evergreens", "The Essential Earthman", "Read All About It", "Rain", "Living It Up In South Austin", "In Transition", "Luke, Mike and Idiocracy", "Calling Garden Prodigy", "Is My Name Fred" .... and so on - without my name, Annie in Austin, or the name of my blog , The Transplantable Rose, or any links back to the author - just outright clip, paste and steal.
The BLOGGING THIEF is using WordPress and has the title DuskDiary. The comments don't work, and it appears that I need a WordPress account to flag this blog. The Flying Monkeys are still on Spring Break, so until one of my wonderful friends in the blogosphere helps me notify WordPress:
This is to advise you, Kosartheg, that you are using copyrighted and protected material on your website/blog. Your illegal use of All the above listed articles at DuskDiary are originally from my website/blog called The Transplantable Rose at the address annieinaustin dot blogspot dot com. This is original content and I am the author and copyright holder. Use of copyright protected material without permission is illegal under copyright laws.
Please take one or more of the following actions immediately:
Re-write the post to include excerpts with a link to the original content.
Credit the material specifically to me, as author, and my website The Transplantable Rose.
Remove the plagiarized material immediately.
I expect a response within 5 days to this issue. Thank you for your immediate action on this matter. Annie in Austin
If you're just arriving at this post, please read the comments. The theft of posts from my garden blog is just one just a small part of a larger problem, and the commenters have a lot to say.
March 26th
Another user has reblogged my stuff again. This time it's at a different WordPress site under the aegis of financehelpblogdotcom which is not cooperating in letting me report the stolen posts. The user is kingarthur11460. If you are watching out for reblogging of your own content, financehelpblogdotcom may be a place to look.
Why have the stolen blogs all been reblogged under WordPress? Is there something about WordPress that is making it attractive and easy to use for spammers and thieves? But the stolen content is mainly from Blogger blogs. There are no answers, yet - just more questions.
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