Could one not just put one's hit-counter code at the bottom of one's posts and get counted that way as well?
 

For the most part, nobody who blogs about the MMO genre is going to mind if their feed is re-posted (via RSS with proper linking/attribution) on an MMO-focused aggregator. However, let's say that your feed is being aggregated by a site with a stated purpose that is contradictory to your own?

We've had a similar issue locally. Several bloggers in Georgia have found their political feeds re-posted on a political-focused aggregator. This aggregator has a rather distinct political leaning in its presentation, often contradictory to the blogs it aggregates. But yet, it lists these blogs as part of the [name of the site] Network, as if each of those blogs is contributing supportively to the general aggregator.

So the problem with RSS aggregator sites is not with the aggregation -- we blog, therefore we produce a feed -- but with the implied endorsement of said aggregator site when such an endorsement does not exist.
 

It would be nice if the people who run aggregator sites like that would send an email to the author or site admin and ask "Hey, I run a new aggregator, mind if I aggregate your site?"
 

Not telling the truth?

Aye - they post a link to my column, and to many, many others.

But the authorship is often quoted wrong, and if someone is reading my stuff here, and not where I host it, how am I not losing money?

Snippets are fine - flattering even, but to see your work posted in entirety with no credit to you, or worse - no reason to LINK to you, it is an insult.

I don't want my name sitting next to a big ol' banner for plat sales, thank you.

By what you are saying, I can sell a copy of a Steven King book with the cover torn off, without giving money to Mr.King because "Hey, people are reading it, right?"

Permission would have been nice. Snippets would have been nice - entirety? Often misleading?

Not-so-much.
 

Not telling the truth...that IS interesting. Oddly enough Coyote's material? Copyrighted under US law to the Ten Ton Hammer network. Reproducing it? Illegal which is clearly stated in the DMCA claim we submitted to the site registrant AND the domain host.

If that craptastic BS site actually had legitimate registry information I would've been more than happy to discuss a resolution with them. Problem is? They don't.

We have no issue with them ripping off the teasers and news stories we spend our valuable time writing just so they can repost it lazily but when you are ripping off the entire blog?

They need to do their own work and stop leeching off others.
 

But the authorship is often quoted wrong, and if someone is reading my stuff here, and not where I host it, how am I not losing money?

The authorship is part of the RSS feed. I'd recommend you simply turn your RSS feed off if you don't want your material reproduced. Or to stick to your Steven King example: If Mr. King doesn't want his books reproduced, he shouldn't be sending CDs with his book in electronic form to everybody. By offering a feed you give people permission to read it or to aggregate it. No feed, no problem.
 

You want to see how it should be done?

Go to EQ2-Daily.com - they have it right. A GOOD feeder site, offers a link and a small description.

And what RadarX says is the crux of it. You cannot contact these people - trust me, I tried. They are under a secure "discrete" domain, have no real contact information and cannot be reached.

So even if I was livid and demanded something off their site, how would I go about that? Just because I write - they have the right to reproduce it for profit?

I have huge personal issues with the plat/power-leveling/and other illegal services they tout. Why would I want to feed that?

-Coyote
 

So..turn off my feed and don't work with legit feed sites that do it right, rather than complain about those who are abusing the relationship?

How can you not see the futility in that?
 

This is apples and oranges.

Coyote is an employee of Ten Ton Hammer. Our work is compensated and judged partly on traffic. Yours I'm guessing is not so why do you really feel this is a fair comparison?
 

I think what they do is vile and I'm shocked that you would link to them.
 

Tobold, I strongly disagree with you on this issue.

First, you refuse to even mention the urls of gold selling sites in posts so as not to drive traffic to them. Yet, somehow, the fact that content written by people like Coyote and RadarX - who are strongly anti-gold-selling - is being copied to another site that accepts banner ads from gold selling sites and used to drive traffic to them is somehow acceptable.

Second, how are those 1,000,000 visitors going? How many would you have had if, from day One, a half-dozen "aggregators" copied every single word you wrote to their own sites? You would be celebrating 10,000 visitors these days, not a million.

Third, even mainstream blogs like Engadget will post the RSS in such a way that those reading their content via readers like Bloglines have to sometimes click on a "Click here to read the rest of this post" link, to make sure every visitor has to visit the site occasionally.

Posting the title and first couple of sentences, and forcing you to visit the originator of the content for the rest adds value and compensates you for it, without denying revenue to the content creator (and possibly enhancing said revenue).

Example: I have about a dozen or so blogs in my MMO category in Google Reader. I skim them once or twice a day. If I couldn't aggregate this way, I would probably only read 2 or 3 of these blogs. Aggregation gets more blogs on my list, and while I won't visit them as often as the 2-3 favorites, I will visit them on occasion, which is more than if the aggregation did not exist. If the posts were included in full in the aggregator, I would probably never visit them, yet continue seeing their content.

Finally, there is a reason this site has made it difficult to contact them or even identify them. They know they are doing something unethical - theft still is unethical, regardless what Wall Street CDO issuers, mortgage brokers, irresponsible mortgage borrowers and politicians may be telling you recently - and most likely illegal. They know all they have to do is make it moderately costly for shop like TenTonHammer to find out who they are and shut them down, and they have won.

Having guys like you support them only helps their cause.
 

L'Emmerdeur : No idea who you are, but I now love you and want to have your babies.

HOWEVER - in the midst of all of this MMOWTF.COM has changed their format (now listing feeds) and has linked to me directly with a bit of link love, plus a picture of me with Brasse, a female dwarf.

Please note - all of this, ALL of it would have been avoided if MMOWTF had some means of being contacted.

Plat selling banners and ads, no contact info, and going through discrete domain to hide your hosting smacked of overseas naughtiness and is what got my goat going. I just wish I could TALK to these guys.

But L'Emmerdeur..you rock in every sense of the word.
 

Wowfix is another "aggregator" site that I noticed on Auctioneer's website. It would seem they have links to the originators, but they actually copy the content wholesale to QJ, and then link to them for the full post. So you see the first lines of a Wowinsider post, click the link to read the rest of the post on Wowinsider, and instead end up at QJ. I think they even steal the comments.

I have removed Auctioneer from my roster of addons over this. I contacted Wowinsider about this more than once, but they couldn't care less.

If you, the content creators, don't care, why should anybody else?
 

Yup, I noticed MMOWTF did the right thing, and they get added to my Google reader as a trial run for now.

But for every MMOWTF, there are a bunch of QJs. Whereas MMOWTF needed some friendly nudging to see the light, QJ is going to need an elephant gun.

With 20-gauge shells, so they die slow and make a lot of noise doing so.
 

I laughed. :)

Look, my stuff gets stolen all the time. Some are badly disguised gold-selling sites that rip my content and don't link back to me. QJ is downright evil, and so are a couple of sites with WoW in their names. But MMOWTF always linked back to me. And the only thing they have to do with gold-selling is a standard Google AdSense banner. If I started to boycott everybody using Google Adsense, which is bound to come up with gold-selling ads whenever somebody mentions a MMORPG, there wouldn't be much of an internet left for me to visit.

All I'm saying is that I can tell the really bad guys from those who are giving me a fair break. I found the wide selection of MMOWTF useful, and now they are even more useful due to the linklist.

Our work is compensated and judged partly on traffic. Yours I'm guessing is not so why do you really feel this is a fair comparison?

So why not set your feed up in a way that it only shows the first paragraph? I did that for years. It took me a long time before I was willing to put the whole content on feed, and if that backfires one day I might still go back to the old way. You don't have much control over where a feed goes, so if it's valuable to you, you might be better off damming it in.
 

If I'm not mistaken, MMOWTF didn't always link back to the original content, which was Coyote's problem in the first place.

It was one of a number of grievances, all of which added up to his post. No way to contact them, gold-selling ads, no links back to the original content and the posting of full content. I have a hunch that without all the other issues, the Google Adsense stuff wouldn't have mattered much in and of itself.
 

Anyone have a surviving copy of http://mythicalblog.com/blog/2007/04/17/the-porn-of-web20/ ? It died with one of Mr. Freeman's overhauls, and it was the first thing I thought of here. I don't know if it is germane or tangential.
 

In the end resistance is futile. My stuff is jacked by MMOWTF and a dozen others.

They ARE linking back to me though and oddly enough I'm getting traffic from it!!

I really couldn't give a hoot if someone wants to copy me. In the end people will know that these sites are not the original authors and the credit will never be theirs.