am I a splogger?

A new term for my web buzzword vocabulary today: “splogger” – a term I just saw on scobelizer, apparently used for “someone who uses a system to automatically copy blog posts from other people”. I am doing something similar with the “skatevine” page on dfr skate zine, but I prefer the term “news aggregator”. I’m not profitting from this as I don’t currently carry advertising on DFR – my reasons for doing it were basically:-

• make the site more useful, a source of skateboard news for people who don’t use an RSS aggregator (or even know what one is)
• a platform to experiment with RSS aggregation tools in plone (currently using CMFSin, shortl^h^h^ eventually to be moved to feedfeeder)
• To provide links back to the sites it aggregates content from in a useful way.

I can see that some people might get annoyed if their content appears on other sites without their permission, especially if the site in question is passing the content off as their own and/or using it to drive ad-revenues. Site owners who carry advertising may also worry that people reading their content on other people sites aren’t going to see (and click on) their ads, but the flipside of this is that if they do link back to the original content, this will boost the pagerank of the original content, therefore making people more likely to see it and click on the ads – this wouldn’t happen if everyone used a personal news aggregator).

I can also see how it can be annoying if search engines rank the aggregated posts higher than the original posts (which was the point of Scobles post I think….), I guess if they got this sorted it wouldn’t be such an issue.