Add to Feed is a WordPress feed enhancement plugin.

As of now, Add to Feed allows you to add a copyright notice to your feed. Besides this, you can also add custom text / HTML to your feed. This can be added before and / or after your post content.

Add to Feed is still a major work in progress and I plan on adding features to the plugin to help enhance your feed still further.

What features would you like to see? Comment below.

Read more about Add to Feed or download it from WordPress Plugin Repository.

I have faced a good deal of problem with sploggers.

While I had one who just stole every post of mine, another kept picking up all my posts because it had the content “copyright”!
And that is because my feeds include a copyright notice.

Owen has released a new plugin title AntiLeech which helps fight sploggers.

AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.

Read more and download the plugin »

While checking the Whois of my domains, a whois for this blog revealed a link from AboutUs.org.

I have mixed feelings about this one.

Here is why:

For those who are not aware, AboutUs.org is a wiki which hopes to capture information of all the domains in the world. I believe this “capturing” is done by a bot which gathers information about the domain from the site, its whois, alexa, technorati and possibly other places.

It seems rather good to have your website on a website whos popularity is rising sharply (the last week Alexa rank is around 4000)
However, doesn’t it also appear to be a breach of privacy, copyrights and more?

Copyright Infringement:

Text from you site is scraped by the bot and displayed on the wiki.
Text from my about page has been copied as is. If the text on your site is copyrighted (which is the case of many blogs today), then AboutUs.org directly infringes your copyright!

Privacy:

Your contact information is made public. My email address was publically visible (via a graphic). I also noticed that the entire contact information, including my phone number was visible for another of my sites. They have a page on how to protect your email address, but why does it get listed in the first place?

While many may debate that all this information was anyway available via a simple whois, I am of the opinion that I have willingly submitted my information while registering my domain. I have not submitted the information to AboutUs.org and hence it is not correct for them to display this information publically.
A private domain registration can protect your information, but it comes at an additional cost.

Freely Edittable Information:

AboutUs is a wiki. As a result anybody can edit / delete the information of your website. This means that you will have to continuously track your website details to ensure that nobody has put any false data about your website.
What is even worse is that you can edit the information without even signing up! :O
That means you can use a good proxy server, edit an article and not bother about being tracked for any incorrect changes!

Ray King’s (the man behind AboutUs) User Talk already has a few angry comments, and I am sure these will just increase with time.

What to do about it?

As of now, there isn’t any way to delete your website from the listing.

So, the best thing to do is create an account, login and edit the information of the pages. Remove all contact information that you don’t like.
I also suggest adding your other websites, which aren’t already listed and editting their information.
This will ensure that your contact information doesn’t suddenly turn up because the bot, or someone else decides to add your site.

Do tell me what are your opinions on this issue? Do you agree with the concept of AboutUs.org? Or are you against it? Or do you think we should just not bother?

Have you dugg this post?

Update 1: View Ray’s Reply

Update 2: You can now use robots.txt to block the bot (Thanks Daniel)

Add the following code to your robots.txt files. Read more about the AboutUsBot.

User-agent: AboutUsBot
Disallow: /

Update 3: Rays efforts are being appreciated. View Tazzy and Piggy’s Comments.

Today, Gary brought up a very valid question about this post regarding copyright issues.

I know exactly what is like and have always done my best to give credit where credit is due.

Better late than never, I researched and wrote to the photographer George Steinmetz asking for permission for using this photo. Below is the correspondence.

My mail:

Hello George,

I recently received on of your photographs via a forward, which was
extremely interesting and so posted it on my blog at

http://ajaydsouza.com/archives/2006/03/18/what-is-so-special-about-this-

photo/

It has been pointed out to me that there could be copyright issues for the
same and hence am writing to you. I was not aware of the true source of the
photo when posting it, but have now (after a good deal of searching) found
out that it was called “Larger than life” and is available as a wallpaper
on NGC (
http://seabed.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/wallpaper.tmpl?issue_id=20050201 )

I am writing to you to ask for permission of displaying that photo on your
site. I have already added a link to your site

http://www.georgesteinmetz.com/

However, if you think it is not appropriate and you would like me to remove
the photo from your site, I will do so immediately. I really hope this
won’t be the case.

Thanks and regards,
Ajay D’Souza

To this his reply:

Ajay,

It’s okay with me as long as you give me and NGS the © reference. A
link to my site is nice,

Best,

George

I have already provided a link to both George’s and NGS websites. All copyrights belong to them.

The photo was only posted to highlight the expertise of the photographer and it’s pecularity.

This post is dedicated to one very useful plugin viz. Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin.

Today I found a post on my blog appear at a feed-stealers site.

But, thanks to the plugin (which I had installed not expecting it’s use) the idiot’s site now has a blaring copyright violation message posted on it.

I really recommend you start using this plugin. It won’t stop an aggregator site but atleast it will make him/her think twice before aggregating your feeds.

As for now the site has been added to my block list in Spam Karma 2 and in cPanel.