Reblogging
Bryan Veloso is a 9rules member and a rising design talent. He also happens to get the negatives of reblogging. What is reblogging? It’s basically taking information from another site and simply quoting it without adding some of your own wisdom to the work. If you haven’t seen this done, then you don’t read too many blogs.
To set the record straight, in my view, if you talk about a widely discussed subject and provide your own original opinion - that’s not reblogging. Most people use reblogging to show their interest in a particular story. But what’s wrong with this is that most of people copy the source verbatim. So great, all I’m seeing is a post which I could have read somewhere else (or had already read somewhere else) but it happened to be “copied by: Jake.” Seriously, when somebody reblogs, WordPress should sense this and change “written by” to “copied by.” Harsh, I know, but true maybe?
Just like if you were to submit a plagiarized essay to your english teacher, there’s no skill required to copy somebody else’s words, online or offline. Now, if you could build on that and quote the source, then you’re on to something. But unfortunately, many people don’t have much time to be original.
Of course I whole heartedly agree because this is what goes behind many of the selections for the 9rules Network/a>. However, as someone that has some experience with making money online I understand why people become habitual rebloggers.
- Fastest way to make money with blogging
- Very, very, very easy.
Actually, scratch #1. The fastest way is probably write a kickass article that gets linked everywhere. The team at Particle Tree are very good at this. Two or three featured articles a month and one of those usually gets heavily linked (they have been on Slashdot a couple of times).
But if you reblog, you can get your site picked up by the search engines and have a chance for some people to come through and click on ads. Reblog for six months and you should have a good number of pages indexed, unless you get a duplicate content penalty. You probably won’t get linked to as much and your subscriber base will be non-existent, but you still have the chance for search engine traffic.
Hopefully you can see my point. To finish this off let’s reblog Bryan’s own words:
I’ve learned that it’s not about quantity. Many authors have built up grate followings by producing one or two great, thought-invoking posts per month. But then on the other hand, don’t be the boy who cried wolf, and never post (although you said you would). Give life to your posts. Even if you run into a story that you just have to let your friends know about, add to it, make it yours. Surely your friends and fellow readers would appreciate your raw view on the issue you were dying to talk about. Don’t post just to post. Wordpress doesn’t need the extra abuse, and neither do you. Give the database something worthwhile to store, and you’ll both be better for it in the end.
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POSTED IN: Personal Thoughts
6 opinions for Reblogging
Jennifer Grucza
Sep 22, 2005 at 1:29 pm
Isn’t it actually against the law in the U.S. to copy an entire copyrighted piece and reproduce it elsewhere? At the very least it’s awfully unethical. Instead, you should only take a small quote (or two or three) or summarize it in your own words. And of course, it’s even better for the reader if you actually add some insight or opinion of your own.
I like how you use this post as an example of the right way of doing things, though the quotes you take from his post are rather large - almost half of the original, it looks like. I might go for a smaller overall percentage, myself.
Bryan Veloso
Sep 22, 2005 at 1:53 pm
Thanks Scrivs, you made me notice one of my word usage errors. :] Anyway, I do think it is against the law to plagiarize which is why so many colleges take such rash actions against it. But I do agree that this is a good example if what reblogging is not. A source article was provided and quotes were taken and built upon. If anything, this is how “reblogs” should look.
Rose Tacher
Sep 22, 2005 at 3:57 pm
These reblogs could also be called linkblogs, but whatever they are called the basic dynamic does not change.
From business point of view these reblogs/linkblogs seem to fill the space of agents. An agent works between the supply and demand as a catalyst. Commodity here is the information. However, the functional base for these reblogs seems to be same as with search engines.
I bet that search engines will eventually drop most of link collection blogs and totally replace them on that arena. For now it is quite unfortunate that engines mistakenly take them as something quite original and useful.
For me blogs are bit like investigating journalism but these link blogs are like poor scientific writing that is only able to present somebody elses thoughts and at most innovatively with a pepper of commentary or reorganizing the original information.
Jennifer Grucza
Sep 22, 2005 at 5:15 pm
Actually, Rose, I think the linkblogs, while not terribly original, are ethically ok. They’re just putting links to other content, unlike the reblogging sites that copy the content in full.
Rose Tacher
Sep 23, 2005 at 2:37 am
Sure. Let’s group them apart - reblogs and linkblogs. Linkblogs should die quickly while it will take a while for reblogs to wither out.
Hock Ng
Sep 30, 2005 at 8:40 pm
Reblogging violates the copyright of most sites. I’ve seen blogs such as Darren Rowse’s BreakingNewsBlog take wholesale paragraphs from news sites. For example, check out this post and the original article from USNews.com. That’s two entire paragraphs that’s lifted from the USNews site - verbatim.
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