Sep 142009
If you read this blog through an RSS feed (such as Google Reader or Bloglines) you will have noticed that a few days ago we changed our settings from “full post” to “excerpt.” This will force you to come here to read full posts (we hope the excerpt will be enough to show you whether or not you’re interested in reading any given post).
The Internet has a large number of “fake blogs” that generate 100% of their content from the RSS feeds of real blogs. Obviously, this is plagiarism. Like many other blogs, we’ve decided to use excerpts to foil this and to protect our copyright.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
11 Responses to “Blog note”
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This is probably going to lead to me unsubscribing. I enjoyed this site, but I don't keep blogs in my RSS that don't give the full post, and rarely visit sites outside of my RSS.
Whoops, we'll be sorry to lose you, but I hope you understand how big the plagiarism problem is.
If it's a big problem for a lot of readers, we'll reconsider.
likewise, I won't be clicking through to read your full posts, because I read at work and I do not want the distractions of reading things on the web. my reader has been a wonderful productivity tool. like the first commenter, I don't keep blogs in my RSS that don't give the full posts, and I rarely visit sites outside my RSS.
as a blog writer myself, I totally understand the plagarism problem – many of my RSS feeds get swiped and reproduced without my permission. but there are other ways to deal with this aside from denying your real readers and avid supporters the full content, like adding a copyright disclaimer at the bottom of each post.
this decision is disappointing. you all have some of the best mad men commentary going on right now, I'd hate to not continue reading. please reconsider!
Remember that quite a few of your readers have no problem with using the web.
Do what you need to do!
I have to agree with #1 and #3. I, too, am a blogger who has dealt with plagiarism, and do what #3 does– copyright statement at the bottom of my post. I (and many others) read blogs out of an RSS feed for a reason– we want to organize blogs and read them from one site, not go to many. If I wanted to do that, I'd just do the old-school, inefficient bookmarking style of reading. I really hope you'll reconsider– I think you will lose a lot of readers if you continue only posting excerpts. Also, many readers don't think of it as a way to stop plagiarism, but instead bump up ad revenue.
Well, I'm okay with this. I use Bloglines and it's (literally) a single keystroke (the letter "O") to open the original post in a new tab. That's NOT a big deal… (Plus, your font is nicer to look at.)
Deb and I discussed the ad revenue issue, knowing that there could be an appearance that this was our motivation–truth is, nearly all clicks on the ads are first time readers only, and the feeds don't affect us.
We will consider reconsidering, weighing the pros and cons, and we do appreciate the feedback.
For Google Reader/Firefox users who don't want to click thru, check out Better GReader. It lets you view the whole post and comments in Reader. Here's the link:
http://lifehacker.com/software/exclusive-lifehack…
I don't have a problem with it, as I often click on it anyway to read the comments. Do what you need to do.
Though I won't unsubscribe, because I love this blog, I think this change will discourage me from reading some amazing posts. Sometimes I only have a short time to read a lot of different blogs, and I enjoy being able to do so in one spot….when it shows up as five or six new posts from your blog it gets quite repetitive clicking on each individual post.
Cedar, if you are using Google Reader, you don't have to click each individual post. Click the title of the blog, which appears directly above the post window. It will bring you to the blog home page.
I do this all the time with the blogs I read, because Reader is slow. I will see 5 new posts listed, for example, at Go Fug Yourself, click over and see 7 or 8.