Blog post aggregation is pretty harmless but doomed

The gaystars site is actually pretty straight – it is full of RSS excerpts from blogs similar to this one. It also does not have any ads, nor does it have any obvious “contact me”

I wondered at first whether it was part of some elaborate scam to prey on the homophobia of Z-list bloggers. Perhaps a  email to the gay stars site from an annoyed blogger would start an interesting chain of events, cumulating in requests for increasing amounts of money. Clever, but not true as there is no way to contact the people behind it.

Instead my current hypothesis is that they are building up Google credibility and then will switch to being a real gay pr0n site, complete with paid links to other pr0n sites. Clever.

But aside from the title and whatever nefarious scam is behind it, what they are doing is similar to what plenty of other’s are doing.  Indeed WordPress themselves gather up posts by tag/category and present them as a package to Google.

New Zealand shows a little how it should work, as does Auctions.
WordPress’s NZ Business tag shows how it should not work.

Such is life on the web these days – content is spread everywhere, and originators have little hope of knowing who is reading it, which is the way it should be.

The blogosphere is fun because we can all build on each other’s content and comments, and get more insights as a result. Sites that grab entire blog posts are not part of that conversation, but are parasitically feeding off the  blogosphere’s energy. I contend that it is pretty harmless though, and may even contribute to the overall influence of a content provider. I would baulk at someone successfully grabbing my content and making money out of it through spammy ads. (The first is easy, but the second – making money – would require an actual audience)

At the end of it all, original content, through bloggers, news sites,  comments or whatever is what counts, and people that harvest content from others will eventually be confronted with Google judgment day and rendered into irrelevance.