Off topic: web page duplication and twitter manipulation

[Lynne Murphy]

I'm not sure which of these you're talking about--and I haven't experience
of the Twitter publicity for the duplications of my posts--but I have
experienced:

Lots of pages that seem to act kind of like RSS feeds on a particular
topic. E.g. ESL.  Like this one:
<http://etn.paulsensei.com/>
There, it serves as a mirror for your blog, with a link back to it.

Then there are the people who just steal your material. And then deny it.
This happened to me with a cooking site that just copied my piece on 'high
tea' (links and all) and another that may or may not have copied parts of
my piece on cuts of meat (that one would've been found a 'minor' case of
plagiarism at my university; 40 lashes with a wet noodle).

Are you signed up to any blog syndication things, like BlogBurst? That can
be another way in which your stuff gets re-posted, though I don't know much
about how it works.

I recently had mail from a Chicago-based 'communications' company, asking
if they could post something of mine, with credit. It was nice of them to
ask, but their utter lack of professional communicative competence in their
emails made me decide I didn't want to be associated with them.  I mean, if
you can't even manage a greeting in your email when you're asking someone
for something...

Hope that helps.
Lynne

--On 30 August 2011 14:14 +0100 Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
wrote:

> 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?



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
Director of English Language and Linguistics
School of English
Arts B348
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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