Good News…No Need to Read My Blog
Good News!!!
You no longer have to come to Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog in order to read it. You can now read Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog HERE .
…And the best part…You don’t even have to know what you are reading is from the Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog.
…because they use my copy and don’t attribute it to me. Isn’t technology great!!
WineOnlineDirect.com appears to be a wine blog with pretty good wine information, if don’t say so myself. It imports posts from other blogs as its own copy. On the front page it has the first paragraph of its imported posts from other wine blogs. You can read the rest by clicking on the title of the post. No where on this page does it mention the blog from which the post was….taken.
When you load the page with the entire post you see down at the bottom of the page, in small, light grey type, "originally posted by Tom Wark"…with a link to Fermentation.
It appears that besides me, others in the wine blogosphere are getting this lovely bit of exposure including
The Seattle Wine Blog, Jamie Goode’s Wine Blog, and WineCast.
WineOnlineDirect.com has one purpose in life: shove as many GoogleAds as possible on to one page and collect as much money as possible from click throughs.
Am I off my rocker thinking I should be getting a cut of this income??
How about you Jamie, Tim and Gene? Have you gotten a cut?
As I mentioned in another post a few days ago, I recently made the mistake in another forum of using someone else’s copy without attributing it to them. Dumb!! However, in my defense, I did not set up a money making venture based on stealing their copy then trying to hide a fleeting reference to them. Color me proud? No. Color me honest.
Wineonlinedirect.com is run by a company called Eyeball Farm out of Sacramento. They are an online pay-per-click ad firm. The firm is run by a gentleman named Jim Bonfield. I was thinking about writing to Jim ([email protected]) to ask why he was trying to pass off my work has his. Or at least to ask him to place a prominent link to FERMENTATION on the front of his website where my posts show up so prominently. Maybe someone else will do that.
Instead I thought I’d take this moment to merely reiterate how cool it is that folks like Tim at WineCast, Jamie at Jamie Goode’s Wine Blog, Gene at Seattle Wine Blog and all the other bonafide bloggers work so hard to pump out good information and viewpoints on the world of wine. These are honest attempts to inform their readers and feed their own passions rather than being….well…being similar to the WineOnlineDirects of the world.
For those of you interested in a very good example of how to use other people’s blogs to help people get info while making sure attribution is given to the blogger check out WineLifeToday and AlaWine .
Wenn das Wein-Bloggen profitabel wird …
… knnen auch unschne Dinge passieren. Die USA sind uns hier etwas voraus: Wein-Blogger Tom Wark vom Fermentation Blog sah krzlich seine Artikel (fast) ohne Quellenangabe in einem anderen Blog verffentlicht: Isnt
Thank you for the nice post.
Thats totally blows, but the bad news is that by posting a link to his adfarm, youve probably just sent hundreds of bloggers to his site to check if their work is being ripped off, thereby boosting their web traffic and probably encouraging them to continue ripping off other peoples work. Wouldnt it be cool if there was some kind of black-list of sites that are just ad-farms stealing other peoples work to pass off as their own and con readers who are looking for genuine wine info, thoughts and insights.
Garry
Fight the good fight, Tom. It reminds me of when Nimble Ferret was trying to rip off my blog. That site has been abandoned. You should move your main protest up higher in your blog so it is clearly visible on his site: “This material was STOLEN.” It worked for me. 😉
AND, on that site, Google sticks an ad right in the middle of your copy, making it not only a rip-off but ridiculous. Thanks for telling us about this; I wondered what the deal was with these sites that “borrow” text and have a jillion Google ads.
Funny thing is, this very post is now at the top of the offending page. And, it only captures the first 10 lines or so before a break. The bloggers that are being content-robbed could certainly rig it so that the page contains junk (or worse, offensive junk), no?
Nice. We had a problem with Avenuevine.com posting entire news stories from the Wines & Vines website (no links, thank you) without attribution, until the very end of the story, where the source would be listed in tiny type. We asked the guy to knock it off, and it looks like he may have gotten the message. The site looks like a bunch of reprinted press releases now, rather than pilfered web stories from other sites.
I know Calwineries had an exchange with one of these types of firms as well. After a heated exchange in the comments section on WineLifeToday.com (an NC-17 exchange no less), Ryan got them to take it down.
Thanks for the pointer.
Reminds me of this:
http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblogs/richter/archives/2007/06/en_claims_plagi.html
At the bottom of EdibleTV’s main page it says, “Unless otherwise specified, all content is made available under the Creative Commons License.” Is that a license to steal?
nobody seems to have noticed, but they have a “copyright” tag at the bottom of the home page. yeah, right!
I don’t know whether to be relieved or offended that we’re not on their radar!
Hi, Tom. I’ve been traveling the past few weeks so I just saw your post. Outrageous! Stolen, no credit or link. How about a “disclaimer” like: “This post was stolen from Tom Wark at Fermentation.” Any other ideas? Gene – The Seattle Wine Blog
I thought that amongst my fellow bloggers would reside a “tech wiz”, capable of bringing down such a site. I don’t mind fellow ‘not for profit’ guys using content, but a robotic thief? Where is our knight in shining armor?
The quickest way to get these people to see the error of there ways is to issue a DMCA Take-Down Notice to their ISP. You make your claim of copyrighted material to the ISP and the ISP MUST ACT.
All the information you need to do it is here – http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi
As an aside, the domain terroir.com is on auction and reserve has been met and it will be sld in 3 days time. Some of your readers might be interested, in case they’re looking for a great wine-related domain name for a project.
http://www.afternic.com/terroir.com
Regards,
Wow. Tom I am surprised at this. Please correct me if I am wrong… When you contacted me, I responded immediately explaining this was a new site I had purchased and was not aware of the situation as the blog had an automated feature called “Auto Blogster”. I was not entirely sure how the tech worked and wanted to understand the nature of the system. However, I committed to righting the wrong immediately, and stayed in constant contact. We exchanged many emails, even emails offering you unsolicited updates to my efforts to fix all of this. I was finally able to track down the Blog’s creator, received instructions, and removed every post, myself, by hand.
We shared several conversational emails and I apologized many times. The content ALWAYS carried story attribution and links back to your site, I did not understand how this could be a bad thing, but I removed the posts any way.
I am all for using the power of the web to smite and offending, non-responsive malcontent, but I was transparent, reactive and honest with you from the start. Given the open communication we shared, I find this post to be surprisingly vengeful.
I have no idea why my post from 6:43 PM posted as “Drewbert”. It was written by Jim Bonfield contact: [email protected]
Tom, it’s appalling. Can we stop this dude from stealing our work?
This is a very old subject, but I am wondering if it ever got straightened out. It looks like Mr Bonfield has made every effort to assure the problem was cleared up, but there was no follow up.
I always endeavor to keep an eye things like this and so far so good, but it always pays to be watchful.