Off topic: web page duplication and twitter manipulation

[Garson O'Toole]

Several list members have blogs or participate on blogs that are
popular. I have noticed for many months that text is extracted from my
blog and copied to other websites. These are primarily spammish
websites designed to fool the Google page rank algorithm by
manipulating content and links.

But I just noticed a phenomenon that is new to me. An entire post on
my blog was duplicated on another website. Next, a group of twitter
users started to tweet about the duplicate webpage. I believe that
each one of these twitter users is a spambot with fake profile and a
fake picture. The construction of the twitter agents and the tweets
themselves are probably automated.

This tweeting could have been done in a way that would have been
largely invisible to me, but I discovered it was happening because the
tweets actually mentioned the name of my blog. The goal may be to
improve the page rank of the duplicate webpage.

Is this happening to the blogs of other list members?

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