May 2010 Posts

Speaking in Raleigh and Greenville, North Carolina This Month

As previously announced, I will be speaking at WordCamp Raleigh in Raleigh, North Carolina. The event will be held from May 22 and 23 and I’ll be speaking at 9:30 AM on May 23. On May 22, I’ll be co-hosting a special, first ever live edition of the SitePoint Podcast, in person with prizes and special guests.

I will be leading a session on “Building Community Around Your WordPress Blog.” I see it as a strategy talk with some tools mixed it. We’ll talk about encouraging and stimulation community within the blog and outside of it. Tickets are available now.

Global Grind Kills Top Frame Bar, Full Content Scraping; Adds Direct Source Links

On Monday, I detailed and reported on Global Grind’s practice of content scraping. In short, they were copying full articles from an array of online publications, both small and large. They would then display this content on their website without any direct source links. The only link on the page, which was not very prominent, would be an internal link to Global Grind’s own top frame bar.

For those who followed the DiggBar situation, this was the DiggBar – but much worse because not only were they framing content, they were completely lifting content from other sources and competing directly with those original publications for traffic and revenue. They even allowed this content to be indexed by Google News, a highly exclusive news engine that most individual writers or small publishers can only dream of being listed in.