What’s the difference between a splog and an issue-oriented, editor selected, portal smacking aggregator?

So far, it’s been fine, but I’m not sure what I’m really getting out of it–and I’m not sure if I really should be getting anything out of it, or if somehow I’m benefiting without knowing it. If the real purpose is for TTS to ‘be a channel,’ not content, as they say, then it would be interesting to hear back from our channel on how things are going–what’s new? What kind of readers are clicking through to me? etc.

Basically, as a Top Ten Source, I’m okay with the model today. As you have said Om, and I thought the same thing when I saw my posts flowing through TTS, they should have ASKED not SELECTED. In my case I know the Source Aggregatess (halley) who selected me, and I was simply glad she thought of me.

The big question: what is this model really about? If I see ads running next to my content and I’m not sharing in that revenue, then I’ll be mightily peeved. And taking me off at that point won’t be good enough to make me unpeeved. So if that’s where they’re going, then I want to know, because AGREED TO revenue sharing terms are the difference between legit and splog.

which gives me an idea…. need to go now and add a certain copyright notice to my RSS feed… ;-)

Hey, who said blogging wasn’t cool — after all, how often do you get to use cool terms like “aggregator” and “splog?” Those terms have come up recently because Om Malik and a couple of other A-list bloggers have rai...

i don’t doubt for a minute that parley is a straight up guy, and this could just might be an explainable oversight. i am just bringing it up because if the bad guys are doing it, then the good guys have to make sure that everything is in the clear.

Om just posted about TopTenSources, an aggregator that picks a subject and grabs entries from 10 “editor’s choice” news feeds and replicates them on toptensources.com.
The issue with this is clear: “Should toptensources be all...

When I started my aggregator I emailed the people I wanted to aggregate and only one responded. I decided to just excerpt to be safe. That is what search engines do and nobody gets upset. I don’t blame you for being hot about this. Soon after my first book came out someone published one with the exact same example set, including example names like Fred Astaire. My big shot copyright lawyer said that examples didn’t count. That’s when I stopped worrying about this stuff. Even so, you are right to keep the pressure on this issue in general. As I said on my blog, where TopTenSources may have gone too far is republishing entire feeds. But if you ever met Palrey you would know that he is a straight as they come.

It’s easy to block search engines using robots.txt or by adding a meta tag to each page:

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”

I think that republishing content and then sending out an email is absolutely not the way to go about it. 90% of the time when a scrape site emails me beforehand I let them go ahead and do it if they leave attribution. If they email me afterwards (or worse yet, if I email them) then I’m already a bit upset about it and will tell them to remove it immediately.

Sounds like a common courtesy thing, so I’m anxious to see what the Top Ten Sources people have to say.