Former Edgeio CEO Keith Teare has gone into the spam blogging business with new blogs that are republishing full content from most leading web 2.0 blogs (and at the time of writing The Inquisitr as well).
The blog at seriouslytech.com (no hard links from me) republishes content in full from the following sites: All Things D, arstechnica, BoomTown, Carnage4Life, Futuristic Play, Jemima Kiss, Lifehacker, Louis Gray, Mashable, Om Malik, readwriteweb, Robert Scoble, Ryan Spoon, TechCrunch, Techdirt and The Inquisitr. There are also other sites ripping even more content as well: seriouslymedia.com, seriouslymac.com, seriouslypolitics.com and seriouslywallstreet.com.
Until yesterday the SeriouslyTech site republished posts with no link back to the original site, and it was only after I mentioned this privately were links implemented to the sites featured, but even then it was only links to Feedburner feed entries, not the site itself. Notably linking to a site doesn’t grant full reprint rights to a blog despite what some in the spam blogging community like to claim.
Teare has explained to me privately the current status of the “project” and what it aims to achieve, but asked that the whole discussion remain off the record, so I cant actually print his defense (not that there could ever be a strong defense for splogging). This is not a Feedreading product like Feedly or a meme service like Onespot: at the moment it’s a WordPress blog ripping content from other people without permission and not even giving due credit back. It’s a number of blogs that are being fed into FriendFeed, that offer commenting on other people’s full content, and even goes as far as offering buttons for the splog entries to be submitted to social voting sites.
I’ve met Keith before and he’s always struck me as being a smart guy, so who ever convinced him that doing this is a good thing (he’s not doing this alone, but it’s all in his name) needs to be quickly purged. I’m sorry Keith, but I’ve gone after companies and people for far less than this (Shyftr comes to mind). What ever this site aims to be in the future, it needs to die now before you start getting the lawyer letters from the very annoyed people you are currently stealing from.