Really Simple Stealing
I heard that line yesterday from Jason Calacanis.
Specifically, I said, via email, "check this out, somebody stole a post from my blog"
Jason replied, via email:
"welcome to my world! people are stealing out stuff every day…. it never
ends!RSS=really simple stealing.
It’s pretty obvious to me what’s going on. Subscribe to RSS feeds, pump them into Typepad, viola, you’ve got a blog. Put adsense and some other link farm stuff, and you’ve got a money machine.
Brad Feld talks how easy it is to do this in his More Feedburner Magic post yesterday.
This is officially now an addition to my Internet Axis of Evil.
Really Simple Stealing joins the litany of other Internet crimes:
The Internet Axis of Evil
- Really Simple Stealing
- Phishing
- Click Fraud
- DNS Hacking
- Comment Spam/Link Spam
- Adware/Spyware
- Spam
- Viruses
UPDATE: I think my post may have been construed to suggest that people will use Feedburner’s services to do Really Simple Stealing. That is not what I intended to suggest and in fact, it’s not possible to use Feedburner as Dick Costolo explained in a comment to my post which I will elevate:
As you might expect, we (Feedburner) thought of this and we specifically coded
buzzboost to prevent this sort of rogue use of the service. There is no
search engine juice or any indexing at all of the content that can be
achieved with BuzzBoost because it is pure javascript and contains
absolutely no content or links to content in the code we generate for
publishers. We specifically built it this way so that it could NOT be
used as a service to "snatch" indexable content for the purposes of
advertising matches or search engine juice. As we have released it,
buzzBoost is an ideal tool for publishers and is of no use to spammers
or those looking to drop ads into a page matching somebody else’s
content.