Housekeeping: Gospel Planet?
I’m hoping web-savvier minds than mine can help me out here. Lately I’ve started having pings/trackbacks show up in my comments moderation que from a site called Gospel Planet. I’ve spent a decent amount of time poking around the site and I can’t find anything to disprove my sense that it’s an automated shell aggregating other people’s content (like mine) to drive up click-through rates for ad revenue. But maybe I’m missing something. The links to my posts are not consistent and are usually in full (and these are not comments but “citations” so there’s no approval process; they’re just posting my content and sending an automated trackback alert to my comments moderator … see here and here). I see no evidence of a human editorial presence, no original content, and no clearly stated purpose for the site (thus my inference about its being a shell). Can anyone help confirm or debunk my suspicions and give me a good reason not to be wary of having of this outfit harvesting my content? I don’t mind the free publicity but I do have issues with entire posts being reprinted on a regular basis. And are any other bloggers getting pings from this place?
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Shayne wrote:
I believe your speculations are correct. There is no sign of human life on that site at all. And there are around 10, 000 posts - about a dozen were posted today alone, including the above content of yours. I am sure it is automated. At the bottom it says powered by Wordpress and gaining access to this site requires a login.
Posted 17 Feb 2007 at 4:21 pm ¶
David Bruce Murray wrote:
I had run across this site a couple of weeks ago, probably by following a link in your comments section.
The site content looks to be random to a certain degree. It probably looks at everything you write, and then filters out stuff using keywords. At least, they’re giving you an attribution, but I believe you could make a case for them violating your copyrights if you wanted. They’re quoting entire articles and not applying any additional thoughts that would put their usage into legal “fair use” territory.
Posted 17 Feb 2007 at 4:45 pm ¶