A lot has been going on in plagiarism news these past two weeks (I missed last Tuesday’s update due to Mardi Gras) but much of it, including the recent Feedburner overhaul, has already been covered here.
However, there are a few important stories…

That’s one of my favorite quotes. I think the reason sploggers get dropped out of search engines and not out of the respective ad agencies because, at these mega corporations, building 221, wing z, bay 3 room 191 is not talking with building 121 floor 2 bay 19.

Could they invest more in creating a “heads up” system where department A alerts B to the splogger, of course, but there’s little financial incentive to do that. Sploggers do generate money for the search engine and can muddy up competitor’s search products. They’ve inoculated themselves against the splogger, now they are going to profit of other companies’ infections.

Clever. Yes. Evil. Not really, but certainly not “good” either. One certainly can’t blame them for wanting to spend money to lose money. That’s like buying the bullet to shoot yourself in the foot.

Granted, the leg needs to be amputated, but that’s another analogy.

Clearly we can’t count on these companies to do the work for us. We have to redesign the technology, from the ground up, realizing this time that there are a lot of bad people out there that will do anything to make a living without actually working for it.

We have to face facts, our Internet, our business model and our search engines were all designed very naively, very trustingly. We now have to grow up, realize Santa isn’t real, that there are bad people out there and rebuild our Internet from that.

Of course, the Internet is so far along now, I don’t see anyone starting from scratch.

I just hope that the Web doesn’t become like email, needing spam filters and other kinds of protection just to be useful.

That seems to be the direction we’re heading.

Great to hear from you! I’m still a big believer in “traditional” affiliate programs as an alternate means of generating revenue, but that can be difficult depending on the topic a content site covers.

Contextual advertising, while spurring on the plagiarists, most certainly helps reward the good guys (such as yourself) too; so it’s important that the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater.

Oddly enough (or perhaps not), I’ve seen very little from the major contextual advertising networks on cleaning up or addressing splog/plagiarism issues. It just usually consists of a few “thou shalt” type lines in publisher agreements.

As you point out in this post on Plagiarism Today, a lot of plagiarism occurs in splogs:

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=184

Active anti-splog measures or invitations to report splogs are basically just covered by search engines usual spam reporting functions.

On more than one occasion I’ve seen splogs and plagiarists be dropped from a particular search engine, but the related contextual advertising (from the same engine) remains active.

I really do think that the search engines and ad agencies need to bring anti-splog campaigns to the forefront and to make it so difficult for them that only the sneakiest survive; maybe a collaborative effort.

It shouldn’t just consist of penalizing these sites in the search engines, but cancelling their owners’ contextual advertising publisher accounts. One splogger can control a truckload of splogs - cancel his account and he’ll soon be broke, and perhaps hundreds of splogs will disappear along with him.

With the way clearer, this would also encourage the real bloggers and authors to continue cranking out their valuable content for free; and more than likely improving on it.

The ad networks just need to invest some more of the millions of dollars they are making in keeping these parasites at bay.

People would still click on links, readers would still get to enjoy good articles; authors would be more fairly recompensed, advertisers would make just as many sales, heck, everyone wins :).

After all, the contextual ad networks always seem so concerned about image; and if the general public became acutely aware that perhaps *some* of them consciously, but quietly, reward splogs and plagiarists because of the money they generate for the engine/network, it may cast somewhat of a nasty shadow on their valuable names….

… but then again, maybe Joe Surfer just doesn’t give a damn :)

I also have to agree that contextual advertising does play a role. To think otherwise would be very naive.

Of course, whenever I’m quick to blame search engines and contextual ads for these problems, I’m quickly smacked in the face with a conundrum, what are the alternatives? Without search engines, the Web is almost completely useless and without context ads there’s no way to profitably host free content. We all know what happened to banner ads.

Yes, these technologies are the root of the problem but they are, frustratingly enough, what makes the Web work.

Until we can find a way of seeking out information or targeting ads that doesn’t reward these methods, we’re going to be in a bind. The worry isn’t just that legitimate writers will have their content stolen, but that the Web itself will be so loaded with junk that it’s almost useless.

It seems we’re on the cusp of that already and that, quite frankly, scares me.

Hopefully we can still pull back from the brink.