I blog here on The Social Penguin and also over on the blog for my consultancy, Velocity Digital. Last week, one of my posts on the Velocity blog made it through the Social Media Today filters and appeared on the popular site. I was happy with that as SMT gets great traffic and can only be good for my ‘personal brand’ awareness. Yes, I did just say ‘personal brand’, you can slap me next time I see you.
Since that happened, the search I have set-up for my name (a must have thing for all people that create content) over on mention.net has been inundated with alerts showing me the plethora (one of the best words ever, that and discombobulated) of other websites and blogs that have taken the post from SMT (quite possibly automatically in many cases – that doesn’t make it any better) and whacked it up on their site. You may be thinking ‘what you freakin’ freakin’ out about Mike, surely that is great for your personal brand?!? It isn’t great. Why?
- Many of the sites are of a quality that is of the horse-shit variety and I don’t want my name associated with them
- Sites that cover beauty, cars, and celeb news have put the post on their site – where is the chuffing relevance?
- They never, ever provide a link to me or the original post. Some even make it look as if it is their work
- Nobody ever asks if they can do it. That’s what really gets my goat. Have you met my goat? His name is Trevor.
Trevor.
STOP IT YOU ROBBING SEWER MONKEYS!!! IF YOU DON’T, TREVOR WILL TAKE YOU DOWN, DOWN TO CHINA TOWN.
I could go after all of these sites and ask them to remove the content, but funnily enough, I don’t have the time. Over 100 sites in this instance! In the majority of cases this amounts to breach of copyright. The thing is, I wouldn’t be that fussed, as long as they attributed the posts correctly and at a push, had a link.
What can be done about it? Probably not that much without a hell of a lot of work and time. Is your content getting ripped off across the web? How does it make you feel?
Mike
p.s. I’m not blaming SMT for any of this.
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Goat image courtesy of kkirugi on Flickr and used under creative commons. Trevor is his mate.
The post Friday Freak Out – Stop Stealing My Freakin’ Blog Posts!!! appeared first on The Social Penguin Blog.
