The Fine Line Between Service And Splog

The antileech plugin so far has done nothing towards actually blocking content and frankly doesn’t really show a lot of promise that it ever will, however it has been interesting seeing where my content pops up. One that looks rather odd to me is dcomments.com. Frankly it looks just like a splog but it doesn’t have any ads or links out to other sites. It does however republish all my content without any extra comments and has the absolute minimum of linkage back to symphonious.net. In fact, regularly through the site the term “Symphonious” is used but linked to their version of the content – the only link back is labelled “Original article here”, right about an Add Comment button.

What the site claims to add is the ability to view RSS feeds in a news reader (the old type, not NetNewsWire) – essentially an NNTP gateway. The add comment function seems to be in debugging at the moment because it just displays some JavaScript popups with “Check 1” type messages and the comment never actually appears.

There are a few things that really count against dcomments.com and make it look even more like a splog:

• It claims to be publisher opt-in based, but I didn’t opt-in and they still republish every entry on this blog. Most likely they don’t have any verification mechanism.
• They don’t provide a simple way for authors to have their blog removed. The contact page lists a few mailing lists, but no simple email address to send complaints to.
• Every page, including pages where essentially the only content is taken from my blog, is labelled “© 2006 -2007 dcomments.com” and they never mention what license my content is under.

Overall I don’t really mind dcomments.com reusing my content, but they also aren’t putting any real effort in to benefit blog owners by driving traffic back to them and appropriately acknowledging them. It also shows just how fine a line it is between being a value adding service and a splog. With some minor tweaks to make the author of content clearer and drive move traffic their way instead of locking users in, dcomments.com could move well away from that line and be a useful, if exceptionally niche, service. Right now though, it takes a lot of faith in the good-will of mankind to not label them a splog.