My good friend Dan has alerted me to a site called ComicBookNewsWire.com (not linking to it on purpose). Apparently, the guy in charge of the site is grabbing content from other blogs, then attributing the posts to people other than the actual writer. I’m going to guess that it’s all a horrible mistake of RSS programming (why attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity). For example, this post is credited to Tom Spurgeon, but is linked back to my blog: http://www.comicbooknewswire.com/?p=773
Even more posts are attributed to someone named Tom McLean. The person responsible for the "software" is someone named Elliot Back, who seems to be in charge of some parasitic blog network.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Linkblogging, Random Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Responses to “ComicBookNewsWire.com?”
Yeah, I had my lawyer ask them to stop, and they promised to. I have nothing to do with them, and neither does Tom McLean at Variety to the best of my knowledge.
The most benign explanation would be this is something that’s designed to grab a couple of lines of text and there’s two glitches — one that grabs all the text and one that credits it to people who have nothing to do with it. Or it could be somebody acting like a jerk.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:18 pm |
I keep ending back up on their site even after I repeatedly asked them to de-link me. Most recently, my content is attributed to Tom Spurgeon and linking back to someone else. Unfortunately search engine results take a reader not to my site but elsewhere.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:55 am |
“I’m going to guess that it’s all a horrible mistake of RSS programming (why attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity).”
I’m going to have to go for malice on this one, as the site is hosted at ThePlanet.com. Do a search on Google for ThePlanet.com and scrapers, and you’ll find a lot of reports of bad activity coming out of this range. ComicBookNewsWire.com did the same nonsense to me tonight, and I happened across your post while looking for some info on these guys. I decided to finally block all of the ThePlanet.com’s IP range. It may not be something you want to do, but I’ve yet to anything legitimate come from there.
February 7th, 2007 at 12:15 am |
I’ve also noticed that posts on ComicBookNewsWire.com are attributing content from my blog to someone else. I’ve written to Elliott Black (I could find Tom McLean’s e-mail address) asking him to fix this. I’m hoping it’s just an innocent mistake.
Like the person who posted above, I happened upon your page while looking for info on ComicBookNewsWire.com.
Debbie
February 12th, 2007 at 12:45 pm |
ps. That should, of course, have been “I COULDN’T find Tom McLean’s e-mail address..”).
February 12th, 2007 at 12:45 pm |
Hello folks. I object to the parasitic notion–unfortunately spammers have taken over WP Autoblog (google will serve you) as a tool for producing spam. The original idea was just using RSS as an import tool into Wordpress, and the format it generates adds attribution to the original source (item:link) and a “software by” link to my page. Hopefully someone will take over the tool and stick their own name on it and then I can forget it exists. Ironically, Feedwordpress existed a lot earlier than this software, and it does the same thing, but it never caught on.
February 12th, 2007 at 9:32 pm |