When I was publicly requesting naijalive.net to remove my blog from their “aggregator”, little did I know that Akin Akintayo had already blogged his critique of the very same service on 3rd July 2007.
Amateurs aping professionals
Thinking aloud – I received an email/blog comment yesterday from someone who had decided to exploit an opportunity – the absence of the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA).
He goes on to criticize the folks running NBA about what he considers “problems with the professionalism of the managers where a “take it or leave it” attitude prevailed in some experiences”.
I am obliged to react to this though:
Allowing something as benign as running out of space on the server to happen is rank unprofessionalism of the highest order and really beneath contempt, you really cannot do business with people like these and it is a shame – just because it was free does not mean it could be run with such levity.
The folks behind Nigerian Blogs Aggregator, are same people running Nairahost. It beats me then, how disk space can be an issue. The only problem I have seen sometime ago on their site was an error message. (Can’t remember the exact error). I promptly notified Kazey to fix it.
Now, back to Naijalive.net:
In this case, there is no competition but a pretender replacement for once established NBA service.
🙂 Ouch. That hurts. 🙂
Comments were left on that blog and those did not reflect back at the source – I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a backup of my blog on another site without agreeing on the quality and state of publication – the key should be aggregation and not sub-standard duplication.
Like more knowledgeable people have opined, there are better aggregators than the one implemented, another indicated it looked like an illegal scrapping of contents. In fact, I expect that any publication of my material in sites I do not exercise control over should include citations and acknowledgements.
Besides, I know full well how I want my blogs and material to be displayed, they are displayed as you can find on my blog, any aesthetic changes to the layout or formatting should and must only be done with my expressly granted permission. More so, it is really better to publish the headers and probably the summary, just like NBA did.
Akin’s critique, is on the mark. When Naijalive.net started, they did not quote their sources at all and did not link back to the original blog and this made their “aggregation” strictly plagiarism. I would have had no problem if all Naijalive.net did was to re-publish an excerpt of my posts like NBA does.
If anything at all, I’m okay that they’re removing my blog and have now published their contact info on their website. Made me wonder though, how would anyone put-up a website without their contact information?
Do not get me wrong. There is absolutely no reason for NBA not to have competition but such competition must raise the standards and not merely offer a mediocre alternative. What is worth doing at all, is worth doing well. I’m sure no one is complaining about Afrigator, AfricanLoft, AltNigeria, AfricanPath who are all good alternatives to BlogAfrica and Global Voices, in their own ways.
To Naijalive.net, apologies accepted. 🙂
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