Jonathan Bailey has a very informative article about the history of plagiarism on the Internet and a brief overview of some of the techniques used in the past and now. He feels that much of the Internet plagiarism done today is done so via scraping RSS feeds.

He further points out that many bloggers don't realize that their blogging platform automatically creates an RSS feed and thus they are not aware how easy it has become for them to be a target of plagiarism, regardless of what topic they write about.

The good news is that you can take some actions to reduce spamming. Jonathan mentions these as well; I've simply couched them in my own words and added some commentary.

Firstly, inform yourself about RSS/ Atom web feeds and content syndication. If you have friends who have weblogs and you feel that they don't know what web feeds are, inform them, too.

Secondly, you can use partial text feeds. If you prefer full-text feeds, considering signing up with an ad network to insert your own ad code into your web feed. Most splogging software is unintelligent and doesn't remove the code. It's much easier to thus track use of your article content.

Jonathan also mentions that Feedburner has a service where they inform you of uncommon uses of your feed (providing you've "burned" your feed with Feedburner). However, I believe that's a premium service that you have to pay for.

Another technique Jonathan mentions is of using an invisible image to track usage. This is known as pixel tracking, and a concept Rok introduced me to, which was originally used in email marketing.

The idea, extended to website use, is to use an "invisible" 1x1 pixel image in all your website/ weblog articles. If your articles get scraped for use in a splog, you can detect this by checking your website's web server logs. If you have access - some budget hosting companies do not allow this, or charge extra.

One other method is IP blacklisting. Track sploggers of your content, and block access to your web feed from their IP addresses. Unfortunately, this requires that you do not use external services for content syndication such as Feedburner, and that your RSS/ Atom content be served up dynamically with a web script, instead of in static XML form.

Doubly unfortunate is the fact that I have yet to come across a single weblogging platform that allows you to easily turn off your web feed or divert it. However, the good news is that most of the open source platforms will allow you to tweak the code. So you could either build a plugin to block certain IPs, or tweak the platform source code to do so.

Jonathan thankfully concludes that RSS is "a powerful and useful tool for distributing content on the Web," and that it's not RSS that is to blame for splogs. "Web spamming would still continue."

In fact, sploggers use many of the exact same techniques used by "legitimate" spiders/ bots to index your website. I've written countless spiders of my own, as a diagnostic tool for the sites that I was responsible for. It's how you use the technology, not the technology itself.

(c) Copyright 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Tags: rsscases, rss cases, content syndication, web feeds, plagiarism