Remembering the blog aggregators that were plagiarists

Crawling for references

Looking at my blog statistics today after noticing a sudden spike that had already doubled the number of views yesterday, I checked on the traffic sources and impacted pages with piqued interest.

The prominent page appeared to be someone searching for all the blogs I had written about my dear friend Dick van Galen Last who passed away just over a decade ago.

However, I could not help but notice another blog that represented a dispute about blog aggregation in July 2007. I had noticed that a site many bloggers of that time subscribed to was down, the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA) referenced hundreds of Nigerian blogs, showing the headers of the latest blog and linking back to the source blogs.

When aggregation turned sour

Blog - The Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator - down too long already

It appeared the owners of the blog, which was free allowed it to fall out of maintenance with an error pertaining to the lack of disk space. The domain is now parked, but not in use.

A carpetbagger cohort in the demise of this NBA aggregator decided to launch the NaijaLive SuperBlog that the movers with all good intentions executed quite badly. They published our blogs without reference, attribution, or citation whilst taking commentaries to our content without feeding back to the source blogs.

After a bit of back and forth, I asked for my blog to be removed from their curation because I thought what they were doing was unprofessional and unethical.

For the passion of blogging

Revisiting the whole sordid episode today, it is interesting to note that the NaijaLive SuperBlog did not live up to its promise, it is now an entertainment site without anything particularly entertaining there. Oluniyi D. Ajao still has his blog running now as Tech dot Africa and Global Voices Online ran a piece about the dispute.

It is a shame that I have not found a service that provides the kind of blog aggregation we are happy to subscribe to, and many of the competing platforms then have failed. For many, it is was a passing fad for which they had no passion or purpose, they simply coasted on the content of others to gain influence and maybe credibility.

My blog remains a non-commercial and personal vehicle of expression, we were not looking for popularity or traffic to boost our egos, we just knew and enjoyed what we were doing and simply demanded the courtesy of being informed of having our content curated and presenting the same content differently only after agreed consultation.

The blogs below take you back to the history and events that ensued. The NaijaLive is lost because for all their bluster, they could not keep their side of the bargain.

Blog - NaijaLive - PS. Aggregation not poor duplication

Blog - Naijalive: After all the comments

Thought Picnic: The cattle rustlers on my blog

My fresh tomatoes

I cannot say that I am the best self-promoter of my abilities especially those that pertain to writing and that might inform why I have not made a living from it to date.

In some ways, I have taken this as a pastime even though many have tried to persuade or encourage me to take up technical writing in relation to my professional expertise, general writing as can be seen on my blog or even writing my own story which appears as snapshots in the many blogs I have written.

As a proof-reader, there is something natural first and then academic about how one feels for the English language, I have found myself offering that service many a time for free.

A farmer at heart

Now, I have been blogging consistently for over 7 years and that is good while longer than many more popular blogs and meeting places within the social networking environment, I believe that probably must count for something and maybe it is a testimony and profile of the things I cover.

The other day, I added a page to my http://akinblog.nl site which I called Blogging Trophies to showcase citations I have received from different websites by reason of what they might have found useful about my writings.

There is a reason why I jealously guard my material, I like the way it appears, I like the way I format my copy and I like to maintain control over what I write without the threat of it being edited, misrepresented or excerpted out of its particular context.

Sowing on my land

I can only enforce such strict control on my blogs or on blogs were I have been given a modicum of administrative control to ensure that the material does not lose my fingerprints.

I am usually inspired as I write and so there first publication might contain errors that need correcting over time, I have been known to review blogs that have been published for over a year and more because they are all posted for posterity, I publish and damn the consequences, like Pontius Pilate, I have written what I have written contextually but refinement is required in spelling correction, inscrutable grammar and some other foibles that writers might be prone to.

Rustlers on my corral

I have gotten into a good few spats about seeing my complete blogs appear on websites I have not given the permission to use my material. It grates when consent is implied by offering back-references to the original material, it is just not good enough – there is a reason why my blog exists, it contains itself well enough not to have to be replicated for the bolstering of other lack-lustre duplicators of material.

The links below show how much of a fuss I am ready to kick up.

NaijaLive - PS. Aggregation not poor duplication

Sahara Reporters has infringed my copyright

Courtesy demands that express permission be sought and it is my prerogative to grant permission if I am so inclined, at the very least, those who wish to showcase my blogs or my writing have engaged me in conversation and communication to determine if our goals and objectives are suitably aligned.

No matter how inconsequential, I do have a reputation that I guard jealously, it would be advisable to those who have crossed the bounds of ethical conduct to make amends or expect consequences – I always win the battles I chose to fight.

Naijalive: Apology accepted but ...

NBA down again?

As one writes this, the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA) brings more grist to the mill of the Naijalive Project which goes by the name of The Nigerian Super Blog (TNSB), such is life in the cut and thrust of Internet businesses or services.

A click on the NBA link from my blog presents this error

Failed to execute the SQL query

update item set unread = unread & 30

Error 1194: Table 'item' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

It makes you wonder what is going on in the Web 2.0 world of NBA that in less than a month we have had two major failures that are taking days to clear up.

Given that the proprietors are busy, this has become a service that cannot be managed with levity anymore, it is a non-profit thing and it is time that the owner got other people involved in some voluntary and community service role to ensure the service continues to function lest these operational lapses contribute to ruining the reputation of otherwise resourceful minds.

Apology accepted

After my last blog on the Naijalive comments , I received another message from the Project Co-ordinator of Naijalive, which summarily was an apology along with an explanation as to why the quality of exchanges had developed into a kind of confrontation.

I accept the apology wholeheartedly, I also reserve the right to use my forum to address the concerns I still have with the Naijalive Project, I might yet ask to be registered in that service sometime in the future, but for now, I have serious concerns.

Cached material or stale material

First, I do not fully understand how their system of aggregation works because it is either caching or saving separately blogs published by others - inconclusive, but the permanent link does not return to source.

We are all aware of how the Web 2.0 phenomenon has exposed people to unfortunate circumstances like universities trawling the web to find ill-disciplined students, employers sanctioning staff for sailing close to the wind with their opinions and so on.

On the 23^rd of July 2007, Chxta posted an article on his blog titled Some UK varsities in critical condition? [Post now removed on TNSB but a link to the captured graphic appears below]. After a few comments, he decided to take it down with a notice Post Goes Down, we, his readers remonstrated strongly about this action and left it at that.

It would appear whilst the post is already down, at least not available for public viewing on Chxta's World , it is quite available on the TNSB but only without the comments that lead to Chxta taking down the blog in the first place, this really bothers me.

Relinquishing control

This presents serious issues of control and informs my concerns on the quality of aggregation, if an item disappears from public viewing at a source, should it not reflect at the aggregator after a refresh of feeds?

Now, I would not know if Chxta moved that post into a draft repository which hopefully is not set to publish feeds or deleted it entirely.

Google does have a feature for caching websites such that the data is viewable long after the source has completely disappeared, but that is a service that should be inherent in sophisticated search engines not aggregators.

Serious legal implications

The more serious implication of this observation is where a legal requirement arises for a post to be taken down completely from a blog site and the litigant still finds traces of the grievance matter linked to the source even though the originator has no control over that "duplicated" material.

Now, I am not sure of full technical scenario of this observation, but it means Chxta either has to do something about it or TNSB needs to introduce some sophisticated code to rid their site of material that has been archived when the source has withdrawn an article.

Now, archiving is another matter but it is important the originators retain control of their material, if we must publish, so be it, but definitely not be damned by the actions of others.

Addendum: Added after Naijalive comment

Naijalive have commented on this matter and this is what they say.

Chxta's post is still showing up because feeds imported into the SuperBlog are automatically cached and archived and unless we remove them manually, they remain there.

They are working on ensuring that posts removed at source are automatically removed on TNSB, I commend them for looking seriously into this, but would having symbolic links to the source not be better than the additional management of cached and archived material?

I worry, I really do worry, but would patiently wait for their solution, I suppose I would be addressing the interface, navigation and user-friendliness when i next touch the topic of Naijalive. They are learning and improving.

References

I love this website

The truncated part of the Chxta's article as it appeared on TNSB - Captured from viewing TNSB as evidence supporting my observation.

Naijalive: After all the comments

I was THINKING ALOUD

It would appear nobody saw the first two words in my blog about the advent of Naijalive's Nigeria Super Blog - it states; Thinking Aloud.

I am getting quite fed up of seeing references by the proprietors of this project trying to cast me as villain; excerpting for emotive aggrandisement elements of my posting and leaving out the fundamental principles I was raising.

After their lengthy apology and then unsavoury comments dotted around blogs about this matter, I have already requested and they have acceded in removing my blog from their forum.

I wrote that blog in the light and context of the deprecation or absence of service from the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA) - I would note clearly that I specifically subscribed to NBA and by doing that I was accepting the way they were representing my information.

Consent is pre-eminent

My beef with Naijalive was based on the following:

They registered me in their forum without my consent, the first I heard of this service was when I received an email asking me to change the way my feeds are submitted.

When my blog appeared on that site, all the formatting I had for my blog had been subsumed into some bland nondescript format and then people posted comments that did not reflect back at my blog.

Whatever they might want to call their type of aggregation, that meant that my blog was being altered and duplicated somewhere else where I did not have any control.

Making an ASS of U and ME

From my experience, there was a particularly "Nigerian" attitude about this service, they automatically assumed everyone who is Nigerian or has a Nigerian affiliation would want to be a participant and hence no consent is required in some absurd sense of brotherhood.

No, that is not how it is done in polite society or Internet ethic circles, even when I register in more established forums, I have the option to opt in or opt out of their services, I control how they interact with me.

I took particular exception to them requiring I change my feeds for a service which they have lauded to my distraction as a beta and preview (That is just semantics, the site is live, public and under continuing development, see the definition of preview below), I have been blogging since December 2003, I have never had a request like that from established aggregators because they know the choice of how I want my blog syndicated is primarily MINE.

It begs the question how many people would take actionable suggestions from a business that has not had time to prove themselves who are in a trial phase of their project. It would be a completely different thing if I was asked to participate in some user acceptance testing or become a pilot user before the preview went live.

Amateur and pretender

I stand by my use of the words "amateur" and "pretender", they are words that can be read in the most wide-ranging contexts that you may care to have; that they have taken the most negative connotations of the words is their prerogative.

They are amateur because evidently, none of them are in any mainstream information technology occupation; the project is run by a petroleum engineer, a civil engineer and a microbiologist and a free site.

They might engage computer experts in this project, but it really did first look like a dabble, a "have a go" thing because everyone is into the stuff. By their admission their tasking careers give them little time to spend on the project amidst the protestations that they intend to make this project as professional as possible. It would be no surprise that essential blog management expertise might be missing in the flux of amazing ideas.

I employed the word pretender because we have already been used to other services which have provided us similar functionality regardless of how they try to differentiate their offering, many other knowledgeable people opined that their approach was suspect and suspicious.

Coming late into this business of blog management there fundamental things that would be expected of any new service and at my first review, it was not close on any account to services I was already familiar with.

Welcome to the harsh realities

There is no doubt that Naijalive is adapting to the harsh realities of starting up an Internet venture in the blog genre and changes have been made to accommodate many of the requests but the core principles still remains

• consent is required prior to registering a blog in your site

• the look and feel of the blog should be retained except where excerpts or quotations are extracted, if the whole blog is published, it should not be different from source material

• comments made to the blogs in the project, should and must reflect back in the comment areas of the source material

As usual, the proprietors would try to bluff their way through this matter, one could almost say that is also a typical Nigerian trait, by castigating dissent and criticism, having apologised their comments in  other forums about my original "thinking aloud" blog simply showed they were in no way contrite by trying to play victim when in fact they were wrong - ethically and professionally.

Even one comment by probably an "expert" in Internet Law wondered why some people could be so anal - has someone's Emotional Intelligence just taken a plummet or what? If only people would address the core principles and spare us the emotional trips.

I have nothing against what Naijalive is doing, it has its purposes, none of which serve mine; but I got involved because I was co-opted without consent, it does not mean I should lose my rights to criticise their actions constructively or otherwise, be the business Nigerian or Martian, I take no prisoners on matters of principle.

Flexibility would help

In terms of advice, there is one last thing Naijalive requires, flexibility - make the superblog a collapsible outline, present the full text of the blogs if you must, but provide a button that collapses the blogs into just the title and the summary so that people do not have to scroll through pages of text to get to the blogs they really want to read. [This feature seems to have been implemented similar to that of the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator, a duplication of an existing aggregator service, I would think].

There are people who write good summaries of their blogs too. By the way, it is Mr. Akintayo, not Mr. Akin, the effrontery of tyros is baffling, to say the least.

PS: For all who care to check, a preview according to the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary is to see beforehand; specifically: to view or to show in advance of public presentation - by definition and reality, the Nigeria Super Blog is NOT a preview, it is like I said earlier, online and available to the worldwide public, not a select audience of reviewers. I think that puts paid to that charade.

References

Aggregating the Nigerian blogosphere. Re: Naijalive.net - Oluniyi David Ajao » Blog Archive

About the Project | The NaijaLive Official Blog - No more as the original purpose.

Global Voices Online » Nigeria: Talking About Aggregation, Copyright and Professionalism

Open Apology to Oluniyi David Ajao | The NaijaLive Official Blog - Lost to a default landing page.

NaijaLive - PS. Aggregation not poor duplication

Amateurs aping professionals

Thinking aloud - I received an email/blog comment yesterday from someone who had decided to exploit an opportunity - the absence of the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA).

It would appear NBA is quite dead that the managers of the service would not be inclined to resolve the issues and bring it back up.

This is an unfortunate development because it reflects badly on the service-centred acumen that pioneers and entrepreneurs are supposed to have, I have seen too much self-aggrandisement from Nigerian webmasters who think running a website is a fiefdom in which they can exercise unreasonableness as power-trips.

With NBA some people already had problems with the professionalism of the managers where a "take it or leave it" attitude prevailed in some experiences - I was just happy to use the service because it was a microcosm of Nigerian blog thought.

Allowing something as benign as running out of space on the server to happen is rank unprofessionalism of the highest order and really beneath contempt, you really cannot do business with people like these and it is a shame - just because it was free does not mean it could be run with such levity.

Requires more than dabbling

So, I read this email and this young man had been dabbling with the dynamics of blog publication and aggregation. Now, I am no technology expert in this field, and I welcome competition that forces other services to improve on their fare.

In this case, there is no competition but a pretender replacement for once established NBA service.

Back to the email, it contained a request that I adjust my RSS feed to display the whole blog rather than my summaries because everyone has offered their blogs in that format.

I at first reacted positively to that request from a complete stranger offering a service similar to the one I was missing without really checking out what he was offering. However, I am disappointed that this replacement service is very much like re-inventing the wheel and it is in no way improving on the standard and quality of the service that went on before.

I have been blogging for over 3 and a half years, why should I suddenly change the way I offer my feeds to an untried, untested and fledgling service, considering there are other aggregators that use the same feeds without complaints? My blog has reverted to summaries.

Keep my stuff my way

Then I visited the site only to find that all my formatting and structure has been subsumed into a bland interface with no backlinks to the original.

Comments were left on that blog and those did not reflect back at the source - I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a backup of my blog on another site without agreeing on the quality and state of publication - the key should be aggregation and not sub-standard duplication.

Like more knowledgeable people have opined, there are better aggregators than the one implemented, another indicated it looked like an illegal scrapping of contents. In fact, I expect that any publication of my material in sites I do not exercise control over should include citations and acknowledgements.

Besides, I know full well how I want my blogs and material to be displayed, they are displayed as you can find on my blog, any aesthetic changes to the layout or formatting should and must only be done with my expressly granted permission. More so, it is really better to publish the headers and probably the summary, just like NBA did.

Confer with the experts

My candid advice is for the mover of NaijaLive to confer with the owners of AfricanLoft (now defunct) and AltNigeria (now non-existent), probably an email to a techie like Chxta would come in handy too - they all seem to know a good deal about the technology and the implementation, they are also developing the blogging environment into vibrant communities - then the mover can come up with a decent product; this well-intentioned but amateurish attempt just would not wash. No, not at all.

If I get proscribed from this new aggregator, that would be par for the course, but I hope I would be doing a sub-par round on this matter - I was thinking aloud about the new NaijaLive SuperBlog site.