You know how you be get chatting with a friend, and suddenly you both just get silly? That's what happened with Sue Clark and me, the other day. Not face to face, over a cold one after work -- because Sue lives in Maine, where she reigns over Lighthouse News -- but online, over at Twitter.com. The upshot was that Sue came up with a new way to "get rich quick"...
Madly off-topic, I know…
but I’ve really got to have a rant — followed by some truly useful links, I promise! — about the Vile Pond Scum known as Scrapers.
Scraper blogs are those ad-splattered automated blogs that steal content from the RSS feeds of hard-working real human bloggers, slap on some Google Adsense ads, and churn it back out again with flagrant disregard for law or ethics. They’ll even hijack your illustrations — so you pay for the hosting space and bandwidth, the Pond Scum Scrapers flash your pretty pictures to make their blogs look deceptively genuine…
I thought so.
Yep, those scraper blogs have finally ticked off the mild-mannered Domestik Goddess enough to make me drop the oven mitts and fight back.
They’ve cost me money, created confusion, sucked up my high quality crafting and gardening time, and (worst of all) spoiled much of the idle socializing that I’d had planned for this past sunny spring weekend. (more…)