I've maintained an interest, for the most part, in the blog, with ups and downs dependent on my outside interests and activities (and those of my family) and since I set it up, haven't changed it

One of the widgits I installed was Feedjit, which allows me to see some information about who visits my blog. Not very much, because I use the free version: I don't market so I don't need to granularize the information.
But I do look at the information, because I find it interesting to see who comes by (and in the case of friends, I may recognize their city)

So I was really surprised to see someone coming to me through a blog called ExpatAngels. When I went to look at it, I discovered that a post from by blog had been scraped and was sitting there in all its glory (joke). At least my name and link had been left,but I was confused: no one had ever asked my permission to use my post, notified me of the use, nor did I remember joining the site, which might have given them permission to use my words.

That made me curious, so I did a quick and non-tech search and was able to discover that blog-scraping seems to be quite common, if even my tiny and quite unread blog can be scraped

For those of you with a stronger interest, or who want to make money on their blog: I wonder how many of our posts are sitting on someone else's sites, with or without attribution?
7 comments:
Hello :) Wow. I had no idea. Thank you for sharing this!!
Ughh. Sorry that this has happened to you.
As far as I can tell - I am scrape free:)
I'm glad you shared this. I blog for much the same reasons you mentioned. I use Wordpress's free version and don't get that many visitors either, but I do get lots of pingbacks, which as far as I know I can't do anything about. They've always been directly linked back to me, so I don't mind. Only once I had someone "scrape" me (I didn't know what it was called). In that I shot them off an email asking them to cease and desist. After I reported them they disappeared completely. A WIN for all of us.
Hi there!
I fear that once you are in public domain with a blog, you are then liable to any unscrupulous bird of prey picking up a tidbit or all of your writing. Is there a recourse against this? I don't know since "public domain" is so huge a territory.
Yes, thanks for sharing. I realize this happened to me once, but I didn't know what to call it. After I reported it, it disappeared pronto--along with the whole blog site out of Czechoslovakia or some such exotic place. I blog for much the same reasons you outlined, with a free wordpress site. Hence I don't have huge numbers of visitors either.
No blogger should put up with this in the least.
If you see your work stolen and stuck on another site, work to get it removed.
And if they're sticking Adsense ads next to your stuff, they're in effect making money off you for free.
Google is good at shutting down their Adsense accounts. Here's a short how-to:
http://lettershometoyou.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/what-to-do-if-youre-getting-as-sick-as-i-am-of-having-your-blog-copied/
Thanks, LHTY. I will follow up this week- interestingly, there's no way to contact this second blog. I have left comments asking to have my post removed, but no response. I'll go through your steps this week and see if it goes away.
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