Bryght stealing Website Content
So there was a little spat on Twitter about UrbanVancouver (owned and operated by Bryght) which is an blog aggregator, normally these work out great. This blog is included in a few like the Open Wiki Blog Planet, the difference is that we opted in to this aggregator. Local radio host Buzz Bishops blog entire archive was taken and posted on Urban Vancouver without his permission.
You can see most of it here http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Urban+Vancouver
Edit: Looks like there are a few more people finding their stuff on UV that never approved it.
Another Edit: Buzz has posted about it here.
Why are we posting this? We want UV to change its method of Opt-Out to totally Opt-In.
August 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Buzz is very very good at generating inbound links. Unfortunately, my office lost Internet connectivity after I caught wind of this, so I have no idea what else went on in the afternoon. And right now, I’m going to cook a delicious lamb dinner.
Suffice it to say that we’ve been running UV for 4 1/2 years as a community blog experiment. Many people benefit from the ability of UV to help generate “press” credentials, for everything from music awards to the Olympics.
Anyone got issues? Let’s have a discussion about what you’d like to see: http://getsatisfaction.com/bryght/products/bryght_urban_vancouver
August 18th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
I’m a managing editor for the site, my role lately having been to fight comment/post spam and add/remove blogs from the aggregator.
As you might have seen from my Twitter stream, there are also people who don’t mind being syndicated, and some have even asked us to add their site. Also, you might have seen that I told Buzz that it wasn’t his entire archive, since the aggregator expires after a while: it discards items older than 4 weeks, or at least it’s supposed to. We’re different than scrapers in other important respects: we confer search engine ranking onto the sites aggregated with direct, non-nofollow links (from the front page in the sidebar), and prominently (though not as prominently as I’d like) attribute each source.
You can even subscribe to a feed of all the feeds, to get the Vancouver blogger firehose as I call it. Some people do. I couldn’t keep up with it. It’s not the most relevant to the discussion, but it’s a neat feature that differentiates us from scrapers. Also, no ads appear on other people’s content.
The aggregator is opt-in/opt-out. If you want in, that’s fine, as long as you’re a resident of Vancouver. Or a former Vancouverite, or write about Vancouver. If you want out, that’s also not a problem. I wish it was easier to opt-in (that is, for a person’s blog to get syndicated without having to ask us) and opt-out (again, a button they can press say “no thanks”).
We’re getting feedback that people would have rather been asked to be syndicated. That’s fair. We’ve always honoured requests to remove sites from the aggregator, and we’ve always been clear as to what we’re syndicating (people residing in or talking about Vancouver) and we’ve been notifying the world as to which feeds get added at http://jaiku.com/channel/urbanvancouver I wish I promoted that a bit more, but I’ve never hidden it.
That about sums up my side of the conversation from what I’ve been saying on Twitter.
August 18th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Or, what Boris said two minutes before I hit “Submit”.
August 18th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Richard, it doesn’t matter if some people like the syndication. I don’t see why any blog should be added without permission; because, some people obviously won’t like this.
As for http://jaiku.com/channel/urbanvancouver most people won’t check that and never will.
August 18th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
So .. the point of the blog is to get very very very small scale bloggers in to concerts and events by boosting their SEO? And making them APPEAR relevant, when really its just the name 18 people linking back and forth to each other and there is no real value there?
Smells like a big scam to me.
Create your own content, let it stand on its own merits. Dont use mine to artifically inflate your own worth (or lack of)
August 18th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
[...] Actually, it might not be the bloggers they’re getting over on, it’s more likely the rest of the PR sphere that is getting gamed. Boris Mann defends his site’s approach by saying: “Many people benefit from the ability of UV to help generate “press” credentials, for everything from music awards to the Olympics.” [source] [...]
September 7th, 2008 at 12:56 am
it would be better with other languages support, but thanks..