UPDATE 4/15/08 @ 2347h: Some sophomoric geekish “humour” above, but as Jason mentioned below, this post is #1 on meme13 right now.
In a well-meaning gesture, Rogers Cadenhead has whipped up some code that tracks the last 13 bloggers on the Techmeme Leaderboard 100, called Meme13, in an effort to spread the word about lesser known bloggers. It turns out that this very blog is on the bottom 13 (I feel like this is American Idol, or something), but I’m not in bad company: Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick is down there, as is Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net, Thomas Hawke’s blog.
Look, I am not pretending that this blog is great, but its certainly not “new” (granted, circa 2006 isn’t vintage either); but those kind of methodological issues aren’t really what stand out.
What does is the fact that — irrespective of the engine behind it (I mean, it could be monkeys skimming the Techmeme leaderboard, for all that I understand about how it could be coded) — Meme13 is simply pulling feeds and republishing them all.
Like any good ol’ scraper blog.
Now, perhaps Rogers wasn’t around this weekend, but one of the larger memes was around Shyftr and how *IT* was pulling full feeds and republishing them (well, that was one aspect of it). I didn’t think it was such a hot idea, and others didn’t as well. In fact, there may be legal ramifications for republishing RSS feeds that two professionals (one lawyer, one consultant) weighed in on.
Ultimately, Shyftr ended up changing their policies (to some degree). And what do we get today? More of the GD same — and what’s really funny (again, not in a ha ha way) is not even that Meme13 acknowledges what side of the debate its on, but that its apparently deaf to one of the bigger memes on the leaderboard that its supposedly tracking, and, one of the “bottom 13″ that it wants to highlight who felt pretty vocal about the issue (me)!
I am flabbergasted, exhausted, and … just flabbergasted.
I have neither the time, nor inclination to serve DMCA notices, so maybe, like a bunch of people have suggested, I’ll go back to serving partial feeds after all.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:24 pm | Permalink
[...] Tony Hung points out, it’s not just pretty useless, it’s also nothing but a scraper blog: What does is the fact that — irrespective of the engine behind it (I mean, it could be monkeys [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 10:53 pm | Permalink
This very post is currently the top article on Meme13. Something amusing about that alone.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:30 pm | Permalink
That made me laugh too. Not yet a day old, and my robot has already turned against me!
April 15th, 2008 at 11:32 pm | Permalink
[...] Meme13 — A Scraper Blog — Gets Facetime On Techmeme. Yay. :: Deep Jive Interests - Tony lets loose with his opinion on the new Meme13 service that was announced this morning. [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 11:33 pm | Permalink
Actually, it is quite ironic, and funny (in a ha-ha way). Thanks for the heads up, Jason. :)
April 15th, 2008 at 11:56 pm | Permalink
I’ve given up with the DMCA thing too (I was doing 3 a day). I do think it’s pretty poor form that they not only scrape our feed but are republishing our images with us footing the bandwidth bill on those.
I also find it ironic that at least in my feed they’re republishing my copyright notice!
April 16th, 2008 at 12:04 am | Permalink
@Darren — thanks for stopping by. :)
There are some who are for DMCA notices and others who aren’t. I tend to fall into the latter category, and otherwise blog and blog and blog my way around it.
Cheers
t @ dji
April 16th, 2008 at 12:18 am | Permalink
[...] outlines in his post, he believes that publishing the full feeds is no different than any of the dozens of scrapers out there. Frederic says in his post that he agrees, and that while Shyftr — the most recent [...]
April 16th, 2008 at 12:22 am | Permalink
Tony, when did you develop this great antipathy toward screenscraping and/or image leeching? Last I remember before the shyftr thing, you were calling amazon petty, spiteful tyrants when they objected to alexaholic scraping their material. Sup, dude?
April 16th, 2008 at 12:44 am | Permalink
@Noob — you must be referring to this post:
http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2007/04/20/the-age-of-innocence-is-over-let-the-age-of-petty-spiteful-tyrants-begin/
… you’ll also note that I updated it to reflect some newer information that, at the time, Jeff Bezos decided to share with Tim O’Reilly. Mostly that the “API” that I (and perhaps others) had presumed was public, was never in fact public, and that the scraping was therefore quite unauthorized.
I softened my stance after that, particularly as Amazon made overtures prior to the lawsuit about acquiring Alexaholic in good faith. Apparently their sum wasn’t high enough for Mr. Hornbaker, and that’s why they went the full for bore in the lawsuit.
So is your anonymized post some way to get me to admit that I’m a hypocrite? I’m sure it is, but that original post you’re referring to was based on a faulty premise that I was happy to admit to in my amendment … so I’m going to have to say “nice try”.
Also, I’m going to say “if you want to engage in this conversation leave a name and email”; I am having a low threshold for anonymous commenters these days.
Cheers
tony @ dji
April 16th, 2008 at 1:54 am | Permalink
[...] discussion on Meme13 at - DeepJiveInterests, ReadWriteWeb, BlogHerald, Winextra, Mathew Ingram, SheGeeks, TechDirt and The Last [...]
April 16th, 2008 at 1:54 am | Permalink
[...] discussion on Meme13 at - DeepJiveInterests, ReadWriteWeb, BlogHerald, Winextra, Mathew Ingram, SheGeeks, TechDirt and The Last [...]
April 16th, 2008 at 1:01 pm | Permalink
[...] discussion on Meme13 at - DeepJiveInterests, ReadWriteWeb, BlogHerald, Winextra, Mathew Ingram, SheGeeks, TechDirt and The Last [...]
April 17th, 2008 at 2:46 am | Permalink
FYI, TechMacro.com (mentioned in your post) now shows only excerpts of feeds but have 2 options for our readers.
1. Go to original post (we always give BIG link back)
2. Read the post directly in the site (in an IFRAME)
I personally think full feed is the best thing in blogsphere and that is one of good reasons why your blog has grown up so far. Don’t just give it up.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:29 am | Permalink
[...] discussion on Meme13 at - DeepJiveInterests, ReadWriteWeb, BlogHerald, Winextra, Mathew Ingram, SheGeeks, TechDirt and The Last [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 2:50 pm | Permalink
[...] discussion on Meme13 at - DeepJiveInterests, ReadWriteWeb, BlogHerald, Winextra, Mathew Ingram, SheGeeks, TechDirt and The Last [...]