A Genealogy Splog

What is a splog? It is a spam blog or web site in the same vein as spam email. Splogs generally contain no original content. Their content is mainly an assembly of links or stolen material from legitimate blogs.

The footnoteMaven blog has an interesting article about a recent run-in with one genealogy splog. In this case, the splog owner steals content from many bloggers (without permission and without attribution), including eogn.com, and then displays advertising on the page as well. The site's owner apparently wants to dupe you into reading the stolen articles and then hopes you will click on an ad, thereby earning a commission for the site owner without creating any original content at all. The splog's owner simply leeches off others who take the time and effort to write original content.

There's a biological term for this: parasite. There's another word for using someone else's words without permission: illegal.

You can read the details about this questionable practice in the footnoteMaven blog at http://www.footnotemaven.com/2010/06/splog-happens.html

I'll add a note to all web site owners and newsletter publishers: if you would like to copy articles from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, you absolutely may do so. You don't even have to ask for permission. However, there are a couple of requirements to keep it legal. Please read the details at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/copyrights-and-other-lega.html

The owner of the splog mentioned above was using material from this newsletter but was not in compliance with those requirements. When I asked him (her?) to stop, all my past articles disappeared from the splog within an hour. Let's see if he or she republishes THIS article!