Rachit started a new blog recently (yet another one!) which supposedly is the one with which he’s going to stick to; he’s even consolidated his other blog attempts in the past to this one blog. So far, he has – for a grand total of ONE month(s). Within this time he’s put up some brilliant content – like the one on Times Now reporting that this year’s budget will be declared on June 31st. I hope you see this link first as it will help you understand what I’m talking about next.
Some people want to take shortcuts to (blogging) success. One such person would be this guy who goes by the name of Anki Tits Me on Twitter. His Twitter timeline is not worth reading since it has nothing but Magpie ads so you needn’t bother clicking on that Twitter account link. He runs a blog called Zindagi Live which is supposedly the India’s largest blog – according to the publicity material on his Twitter account. Recently, he made a post which copied Rachit’s Breaking News post word-by-word (NSFW! I mean it.) Including the images used in post. Rachit hosts his blog on my hosting account, so that friktard was using up my bandwidth. After informing Rach to rename the files used in his post, I replaced the original images with…something else. As you can see now, “India’s largest blog” is serving porn.
This isn’t the first time this guy has done such a thing either. Previously, he’s ripped of a post made by Naman exactly as it appeared on his blog. In fact, there isn’t a single post which is original on Zindagi Live. Each and every one of them is copy-pasted directly from somewhere else. What makes this even more pathetic is that fact that this scraper site isn’t automated. This loser has copied over a thousand posts from different blogs manually. Think about that for a second. Copying thousands of posts – by hand.
The are a few lessons to learn here. If you’re resorting to a life of crime, i.e., copying content from others, then do it properly, will you? For crying out loud don’t send trackbacks to the original site or use content such as images which can be controlled by others. It can lead to disastrous consequences for you. Copying popular content is not going to help YOU in any way. Both Rachit and Naman license their content under Creative Commons (I do too), so if you come across something nice and want to use it in your own work, then follow the things which you are allowed to do under the license itself; otherwise it’s copyright infringement. And I mention this not in a “I’ll sue you” kinda way, but in a “If I’m using someone else’s content and they’ve asked me to credit them for it, then I should” way. Copying content without adding anything substantial will not make a blog popular anywhere.
Learn to respect how other people want their content to be used. Stop trying to MAKE MONEY FAST by copying popular content. No advertiser will come to you down that path. Produce high quality content first, then think about monetizing it.
PS – Link to the blog post on Zindagi Live has NSFW images now that I changed them on my server. Don’t go there if you aren’t interested in such content. Nothing too hardcore as such, but still.
PPS – That blog has been deleted now.
PPPS – The blog is back, with zero content. I mean literally zero content pages, and not just in the sense of ‘zero original content’.