Meme 13 – it’s a scraper blog
As I wrote in my ‘thoughts’ post this afternoon (via Steven Hodson’s post about it), I just don’t get the purpose of Meme13 – a site that is meant to track the posts of the last 13 new blogs that appeared on the Techmeme Leaderboard.
As Tony Hung points out, it’s not just pretty useless, it’s also nothing but a scraper blog:
What does is the fact that — irrespective of the engine behind it (I mean, it could be monkeys skimming the Techmeme leaderboard, for all that I understand about how it could be coded) — Meme13 is simply pulling feeds and republishing them all.
Like any good ol’ scraper blog.
Now, perhaps Rogers wasn’t around this weekend, but one of the larger memes was around Shyftr and how *IT* was pulling full feeds and republishing them (well, that was one aspect of it). I didn’t think it was such a hot idea, and others didn’t as well. In fact, there may be legal ramifications for republishing RSS feeds that two professionals (one lawyer, one consultant) weighed in on.
In the Shyftr discussion, I took the side of Shyftr because I think they create some value around our feeds – but Meme13 does nothing of that sort. It’s just a straight-up scraper. It takes the full feed – mashes it up with 12 other blogs and then publishes that feed. If there is one redeeming factor in this, it is that they at least give credit to the original author – unlike most scraper blogs.
As I’m writing this, I feel somewhat hypocritical, as just a few days ago, I said that you can go ahead and use my content in anyway you want. At that time (and I still feel this way) I didn’t think Shyftr was crossing any lines because it does create value around our feeds.
Maybe it is because Meme13 just feels ‘dirtier.’ Because it’s a straight-up blog, it’s going to get indexed by Google as such and will bring readers to the site instead of the original blog. Because most RSS readers with comments sit behind a login, they are not going to be indexed by the search engines in this way.