Splogs
Splogs is a contraction of Spam and Blogs. There are people who do not create their own content. They simply scrape the content from other Blogs to their own advantage. Usually their aim is to get some Google adword income.
Content scraping has a good side and a bad side:
Aggregating content in a Blog gives the same reading possibilities as you have with a news reader: A quick overview of content created by fellow Bloggers.
The E Hotelier Widget that I use in my sidebar is helpful to pinpoint interesting information from E-Hotelier which in my view is a good aggregator, as one sees an editor behind the postings.
The disadvantage of Splogs is that they sometimes create masses of unnecessary information and mislead sites as Technorati.
And now?
By keeping track of Happy Hotelier’s Technorati ranking, I noticed some of those scrapers between my incoming links.
Darren Cronian of Travel Rants Blog did some research and put the results on a separate Blog of him Blogged Out, especially in his post Take Steps To protect Your Content.
There I found the WP plug in Antileech [I removed the link because of the later problems, see below] which I immediately installed. it gives you the opportunity to block rss imports by sites you do not like: You simply put their URL in the WP plug in.
After a day Antileech suggests to block Google Reader…. I will have to look how that works. Apparently it provides a widget with abuse possibility. I will keep you posted.
(p.s. I added the spam photo on 16 March)
Update 2008:
I had to get rid of the plugin as it turned into a spammy tool itself. Don’t know how that happened.