After my previous post I found out that indeed Google Reader gives you a possibility to add a widget to your own Blog which I have now installed. At the same time I have removed the Google AdSense widget, because collecting cents from clicks is not my primary aim with this Blog. I just Blog for the fun of it, to share with my readers and to learn an awful lot. Besides the adwords Google believes it has to insert are weird.
So let’s see how it works and what is your opinion?
Month: March 2007
Aggregators, Splogs and content scrapers: Antileech
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.
Strange Technorati Change
The T-list mania incurred my curiosity how the link counting at Technorati works.
I have seen my incoming links going up from 16 to 60, but yesterday – or today – Technorati seems to have changed its algorithm and I am down again to 23. It also seems that Technorati updates its link counting once every 24 hours. Strange huh?
Added 9 March 2007:
I found out the updating is more frequent and the total count of links is going up again.
Clever Tags for Bags
A bit drowsy from a flight I stood in the luggage reclaim area of Schiphol looking sleepily at the transport band. When I awoke, I realized I had seen my bag circle three times the whole of the band.
Therefore thanks to Gadling for tipping on the clever Tags for Bags.
Next time I will make sure my bag stands out from the crowd.
Behind Open Doors
Sometime somewhere in my newsreader I had seen a reference to her already, but today I stumbled again upon her Blog: Behind Open Doors, the personal Blog of another Hotelier, Yvonne Lembi-Detert, the owner of San Fransisco based Personality Hotels. Their site is also worthwhile to explore.
To see from the photo Yvonne is a real Bed Jumper.
Added 1st April 2007:
It appears the lady has shut down her Blog.