One thing I try to stay silent on is the competition. There’s no reason to tear into them over stuff. However, I can’t say that I’ve been happy with AOL’s refusal to take on sploggers (people who use software to steal entire blog/sites and post the content on their own web site, as if they wrote it themselves).
For years now, AOL blogs run by Weblogs, Inc have been splogged by people around the world. Now, we at MechaWorks find our sites splogged all the time. There’s one difference though… we actively pursue them with anti-splogging technologies, and DMCA complaints. If there are lots of popular web sites that just passively accept splogging… it’s harder to fight the sploggers.
Well, today, Weblogs Inc finally innovated in this department. Now, all RSS posts, from all Weblogs Inc sites, add a clear footer… with clear notation that an article came from them.
I applaud Weblogs Inc for doing this, and we’re going to look into deploying the same technology on all MechaWorks sites in the near future.