Recently, it has come to my attention that there is a new type of insipid blogger. Unlike splogs which are created to promote commercial websites and contain mostly garbage text, these new blogs look polished and contain seemingly pertinent content of value.

The problem is, the text within has already been published by someone else. I name these plagiarist’s doppelbloggers.

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This article continues down the same path as Teaching Akismet Part 1: I am good with a look at how Akismet could be used for nefarious purposes. In the first post we learned that user input determines what Akismet thinks is spam. In this article, that idea is expanded in order to teach akismet to be bad. Below are listed three potential applications of the idea that Akismet can be taught things.
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So, dumb ass has gone and copied some of my content. I left a comment on his blog asking him to please link to my content and not simply copy and paste it. His response was to alter it subtly and delete my comment. Reading over the rest of his posts and doing some basic googling, I have found that the vast majority of his postings may be ‘lifted’ from other web pages.

So, what would you do?

• Name and shame? - Create a detailed list of this guys copy paste antics and publish it here to let others judge him;
• Another letter or two? - One didn’t work, did he think I would go away?;
• C & D - Doesn’t that only work for one post that I wrote and he copied, so it wouldn’t help the others;
• DMCA - I’m a Canadian, can I use that evil piece of legislation for ‘good’ even though US laws don’t apply to me;
• Combo - one or more of the above;
• Zfactor - Your input, any suggestions?

FYI: The pages this tool has copied from look to be largely, backwards, out of the way posts by authors who have long left the online world. So I expect little help from the others this guy has ripped of should I contact them. Also, the guy is using a cheap blogger account.

Any advice from someone in a similar situation would be greatly appreciated.

Update for John302 (aka the doppelblogger):
Both screenshots taken April 18th, 2006.

Now, I suppose, given an infinite number of monkeys with blogs in an infinite number of universes, that the same list could have been written twice. With all three tables in the same order. With the same capitalization. Co-ink-y-dink? I think not. Fess up plagiarst. You have already admitted to removing the images once I imposed hotlinking protection, why not admit you copied the text verbatim?

Tags in the Head is a WordPress plugin that attempts to make your website both more machine and human readable by using the ‘Tags’ you specify as META keywords in a page’s header. It also allows you to customize the meta description’s for various parts of your site.

Features:
Tags in the Head features include simple ease of use and installation, detailed instructions, the ability to harvest tags for use as keywords from both Ultimate Tag Warrior and Jerome’s Keywords, internal error and logic checking, ability to customize the meta descriptions for your homepage, archives, 404 pages, and every post, and everything validates XHTML 1.0 Transitional. And a logo.
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The following simple, but often overlooked tips on how to best choose keywords and phrases was written in coordination with the release of the Tags in the Head plugin for wordpress. This plugin allows the use of tags as meta keywords in a page’s HEAD section. While these tips can help, the best advice comes from google:

“Make pages for users, not for search engines.”

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Introduction: Part 1 of a 2 part series focused on how Akismet can / could be taught good or evil. Part 1 below explains the situation I found myself in, and the steps that I took to remove myself from Akismet’s list of comment spammers. Part 2 introduces some theoretical concepts for the creation of spamming networks.

For the past couple of days, Akismet (a popular comment spam fighting service provided by Automattic et al) had me pegged as a comment spammer. I didn’t know that Akismet was doing this, I only figured it out after several random blogs refused to post comments I had made.
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Snowfish is a GPL icon theme created for Gnome by Alexandre Moore aka ~sa-ki. The icons can be downloaded from the authors’ deviantart page or via gnome look.

Normally, I try to feature icons that are only of top quality, but this set is an exception. They are phenomenal! Very slick and available as SVG or PNG. Alexandre also has created the NuveoXT and Vistainspirate icons which are some of the best on the master list of free icons.

Click on the thumbnails below to view more screenshots of Alexandre’s Snowish:
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While doing research on free icons I came across one archaic yet popular website. The legalease was so strange that I had to write this short blurb and share. Read on to understand how one ‘free icon’ site makes sure that their icons aren’t free, or even usable. This site in question: IconBazaar. » Read the rest of the entry..