Is this Blog Run by a Bot?

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

In true ironic form, a few days after posting a commentary about blogs copying blogs, that very commentary has been copied by another blog. On closer inspection, the blog in question appears to simply copy posts from blogs relating to cell-phones. Compare this post from PhoneDONE, with this one on Waiguoren, as an example. It is almost like the blog is run by a bot that collects blog entries from various sources. The commentary that I wrote linked to one of the sites that Vaiguoren (yes, the blog is titled, Waiguoren, but the poster is Vaiguoren) copies from.

Before anyone starts calling foul on the verbatim copying of copyrighted material, let me point out that Vaiguoren does in fact link  back to the original post/article. In my case, Vaiguoren even provided an "add this blog to Technorati" button for the original blog post. The manner in which Vaiguoren pulls related news from multiple sources could actually be useful to some. However, Vaiguoren should probably make it more obvious that it is material taken from other sources. Also, providing an excerpt of articles instead of the whole article would be a bit more polite.

The irony does not stop there, however; whilst I cannot confirm whether Waiguoren is being run by a bot, there appears to be another copy-bot, copying the copy-bot (a.k.a Waiguoren). Compare this post on Waiguoren, with this one on News Pilot. For completeness, the original can be found here. Infact, Vaiguoren even complained about News Pilot copying posts without linking back to the original, so perhaps there is a human involved after all.

The suggestion that the amount of original content may be significantly less than the number of blog-posts swirling around on the internet was dead-accurate.

Comments (4) | 17 July 2008