There is a not so new trend that to folks at Download Squad brought home today. It’s called Blog piracy and while not the worst trend I have seen to infest the internet, it still is cause for some consideration.

Yar M’maties

Here is how it works. You spend some time putting together an article on say, the relative merits of Lindsay Lohan as a media phenom. You pour your blood, sweat and several cans of Red Bull into giving a detailed analysis of Miss Lohan’s history of exploits. You publish your piece for all to see, and then you wait.

About half an hour later, you do a search for your article and find that someone else seems to also be interested in Miss Lohan’s celebrity creditability as well. Wonderful! As it turns out, they also used the exact same title that you choose for your piece. Strange. You decide to explore more deeply and discover that by some coincidence they have also used the same … text?

That, my friends, is Blog piracy. Adsense snake pits are the biggest culprits, pulling full RSS feeds from highly read blogs to try to ride the wave of their popularity without having to do the work of actually writing. Honestly, there are much worse things that could happen, especially since these schemes are very rarely more than moderately successful. However, it is a bit irksome.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I mentioned Lindsay Lohan in this article, and just to make sure it happens I’ll mention Paris Hilton. If you want to see Blog Piracy in action, keep an eye on this article and wait for the trackback from University Updates to appear. They have been scraping this site for weeks now, all I wish is that they’d provide a link back every now and then.

Such is life.

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