This is to whoever is behind naijalive.net I am forced to write this publicly because I have been unable to contact you one-on-one for the following reasons:
- No contact information is available on your website
- The WHOIS info for the domain name does not contain the contact info of its real owner
- I have already left a comment on one of your blog entries but have not heard from you.
It is indeed true that blog aggregators help bring more traffic to one’s blog but yours is not an aggregator. You’re simply copying and pasting my full blog posts which is completely unacceptable. Real blog aggregators use RSS feeds. I have set my RSS feed to only share parts of my blog posts and not the full thing.
Remove ALL my blog posts from your website as you don’t have my permission to copy-and-paste my writings.
NB. My blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. Yours is not.
He he.
I don’t think most bloggers understand what is going on.
Allow us to proffer our SINCEREST apologies for using your blog on The Nigerian Super Blog without express permission from you.
Please understand that it is NOT and NEVER SHALL BE our intention to “steal” bloggers content or republish their posts in an unauthorised manner.
The super blog is 17 days old today and we have been receiving a whole lot of feedback (both positive and negative, including yours). These comments have helped us so far in improving upon what we have on ground.
While we do not claim to “know it all” in terms of the usage of this technology, we are actively soliciting feedback from bloggers and readers on our methods so that we can improve and eventually modify the website into something that will be right for everyone in terms of usability and legality.
Apparently, our methods so far has gone down well with a lot of people yet there are exceptions like yours which we take VERY SERIOUSLY.
Once again, accept our MOST SINCERE APOLOGIES for using your content in a manner that has not gone down well with you.
Be informed that we removed your blog from our listings (therefore your posts will no longer show up on the Super Blog) and we are currently in the process of deleting all archived posts from your blog in our database.
Before I close this message though, I wish to make some remarks/clarifications regarding certain specific portions of your post.
No contact information is available on your website
Thanks for this observation. We are sorry about this and shall make the necessary amendments that shall make contacting us easier. We have also decided to include a link on the Super Blog that would allow people to request removal of their blog from the service.
The WHOIS info for the domain name does not contain the contact info of its real owner
The physical address in our whois information BELONGS to the parent company of the project. The email address belongs to our hosts (siteground.com)
I have already left a comment on one of your blog entries but have not heard from you.
Unfortunately we never saw this comment 🙁
It is indeed true that blog aggregators help bring more traffic to one’s blog but yours is not an aggregator
You got that right, ours is not an aggregator. We are only trying to aggregate in a different way.
You’re simply copying and pasting my full blog posts which is completely unacceptable.
Accept our apologies but we are not exactly copying and pasting.
Real blog aggregators use RSS feeds. I have set my RSS feed to only share parts of my blog posts and not the full thing.
Do you really think we can MANUALLY go through 221 blogs every hour, check for updates and then copy and paste onto our blog? My brother, only a mad man would do that I can assure you.
FYI, we use the FeedWordpress plugin for WordPress to automatically aggregate blog content from the RSS feeds of all the blogs in our blogroll every hour. Once again, we use the RSS feeds for each blog.
We do have some blogs that are currently publishing excerpts of their posts as RSS feeds and this also show up as EXCERPTS on the Super Blog. If yours does not show up as an excerpt then it must be due to some other reason and not because we are copying and pasting manually!
But all the same, we do not say this as a justification and still maintain our apologies to you!
NB. My blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. Yours is not.
Because the content we use does not belong to us, and because different bloggers publish under different licenses, we do not have the authority to license the content.
And finally, The NaijaLive is a volunteer project and the people behind NaijaLive are a friendly and happy group and it is not our intention to step on toes, break rules, look illegal or make people angry. If we are going about things the wrong way, we are very sorry but none of it was done on purpose. This is why we are ACTIVELY soliciting feedback from readers and visitors. We want to learn.
The project is still VERY VERY much in its infantile stage with most of the work being done on weekends. To learn more about this project, please see the post here: About the NaijaLive Project
We love your blog and we’d LOVE any ideas from you!
David. Sorry to hear about this blatant act of plagiarism! Is there any way you can contact the domain administrators? Maybe even a call can do…these are part of the very serious issues that are being discussed under any conception of internet governance. If they’re not nipped in the bud now, there’ll be chaos.
You can always go to Yahoo Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com) and seek help from there…maybe s.o. might have experienced a similar problem…
Aggregating the Nigerian blogosphere. Re: Naijalive.net
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 a…
We have just discovered the reason why the comments which you mentioned in your post was never seen by us.
For some reason which we are yet to understand, the antispam plugin which we use on our website blocked your posts from appearing automatically and instead kept them in a holding folder which we rarely check.
We have now read those comments (Jul 10 and Jul 16) and want to commend you for at least trying to contact us privately before going public with your complaints.
Thanks.
You’re welcome. You would have seen several trackbacks from other sites linking to yours too. You need to approve the ones you like, before they’d appear on your blog. Good luck.
For crying out loud, David. I can’t help but laugh
. At least you have succeeded in getting their attention.
[…] on their website, he wrote a post asking them to remove his blog from their aggregator, “This is to Naijalive.net: Remove my blog!“: This is to whoever is behind naijalive.net I am forced to write this publicly because I […]
It’s funny but for some reason I don’t see anything wrong as your RSS feed doesn’t even show full posts. Also your creative commons license says anyone is allowed to Share and to even Remix your content as long as they attribute it to you (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/) and I think Naijalive did attribute your posts to you and link back to your blog.
The problem is Naijalive is doing something already done (NigerianBloggers) but we all need to understand that anything new or the first of its kind will be imitated no matter what. Naijalive is trying to do everything and hold all Nigerian content but they aren’t goin about it too well. I have an RSS driven Nigerian website too and I don’t even ask for permission every time as long as the blog owner doesn’t have a restrictive license.
Let me ask would you mind Naijalive pulling your content if your blog was a new blog and you were trying to build traffic ?
Also none of these two websites built the aggregator script themselves, they are both using free scripts found on the internet for Nigerian content and whether you like it or not there will be more of them who will pull your content. If I for example decided to start pulling your content, based on your creative commons license, I’ll be in totally right standing as long as I attribute it and link back to you.
The activities of naijalive.net was exploitative and an act of plagiarism. 😮