Well this is interesting. I just discovered that some website is using my RSS feed and aggregating my blog posts. I’m not sure what benefit they are hoping to derive – I suspect the idea is to get eyeballs on their site, to drive up pageviews and thus payout from advertisers or a larger number of marks to sign up for their site. To get eyeballs on their site, they’re using content of other bloggers, without those other bloggers’ permissions.
In fact, I don’t really care that much. I’m going to post this blog post, however, because I like the “meta” idea that this post will appear on that site.
To make this work, I will have to name and link to the site. However, I want to explicitly state to my normal readers the following CAVEAT: follow the link and visit that site at your own risk.
The name is “BlogsInKorea” but the site domain is studyinkorea.or.kr. You can see my blog post from earlier today here:https://www.studyinkorea.or.kr/cast/910026.
It looks pretty sketchy – it has some features in common with the kinds of websites one finds being run, all too often, by Russians and Nigerians, including many spelling mistakes and a lot of empty links. On the other hand, if I was more fluent in Korean, I’d be tempted to call the phone number listed at the bottom. But that’s a potential linguistic minefield I have no interest in trying to navigate.
In fact, I’m not particularly upset – it might end up just driving more traffic to my blog, where, since I have never had any intention of attempting to monetarize my own content, it will serve no purpose except the general enlightenment of the public at large.
As a point of general interest, however, I have a question for my regular readers: is anyone using RSS from my site? I don’t think so. I may turn it off.
Update: It worked – the loop is closed. Here is this blog post, shown as a screenshot from their website.
