Tag Archives: mashable

Another shot in the Blog Revolution? Few links if by land and none if by sea.

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Louis Gray is rightfully pissed off at the way Mashable, a major tech blog, did not properly handle some stories written by Gray.   Basically they under-attributed Gray’s reporting of Robert Scoble’s PodTech departure.   I’m not familiar enough with Mashable to know if Gray is reasonable to suggest that they’ve built the whole site on this type of secondary reporting, but I certainly agree that blogs are now doing what mainstream media has done for decades – sacrificing good quality reporting in the interest of monetization.   Also I think the great and thoughful voices of several big blogs have been largely replaced by marginal writers and writing as those sites struggle to become “media companies”.  

Another defect of the new web is that linking practices and linking strategy have become very critical to success – A list sites simply don’t link out appropriately because they (correctly) view their links as valuable and (incorrectly) choose not to give that value away.   

Matt’s got a good post on this story, noting how attribution is a cornerstone of good journalism and Mashable and others should do a better job of attribution, though I’m not clear if Matt would agree that insufficient linking is part of opportunistic linking strategies more than journalistic oversight:

I wrote over there: 

…. but monetization is trumping journalism all over the place and I think the blog community should think about this a lot more than we do.

I don’t know about Mashable’s practices, but often it is marginally paid and marginally talented writers who feed the big blogs that originally had really thoughtful voices.

Also, natural linking has effectively become a “web currency” and many “A list” sites are very reluctant to link to sites outside of their frames of reference – I believe they see it as too big of a favor where even 5 years back it would have been done without a second thought.

I see this as a growing problem with many large, heavily monetized tech blogs. They are (slowly) trading profit concerns for journalism and web concerns. An inevitable thing, but a bad one

Associated Content monetizing plagiarized content.

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update:  I’ve rewritten this post after realizing Mashable is not saying AC did anything illegal.

Mashable is falling just short of charging Associated Content, a well-funded content distribution portal, with plagiarism.   Apparently an AC contributor has lifted a lot of Mashable articles verbatim and posted them at AC.     Mashable argues that since AC claims to edit contributions they should have caught this. 

As Mashable notes what makes this scraping and stealing more conspicuous is that AC is a relatively big online publishing player, not a junky run of the mill “made for adsense” site that would soon be delisted from Google and abandoned.

Of course, few sites screen contributors fairly carefully.  In the rush to create profitable social communities, many sites are willing to turn a blind eye to who is posting what and from whom.    Google’s getting better at delisting plagiarized content, but it’s still a big problem.    The solution is fairly simple but so far few are willing to implement better screening of publishers and writers.   Google adsense, for example, is often run on the lowliest of scraped content websites.   Since Google has a record of payments to those publishers  I find it hard to believe they are doing a careful job of deleting them from the system.    I have not even heard Google claim that they do anything much to ban people from the Adsense program.     With adsense as a prime monetizer of online content both legitimate and plagiarized, it would be nice to see Google blacklist abusers and pass this along to other advertising networks.

However based on my experiences as an advertiser Google is probably the best at following up and creating at least a minimal level of accountability for publishers.   I bought cheap traffic from Enhance and the number of junk sites was very conspicuous in the logs.  Conversion was close to zero and I discontinued the campaign.