Just another note about scrapers- I wish making them disappear was as easy as you make it sound. Scraper bots try to attack my other blog all the time but it’s well-defended for the most part (think Spam Karma2 and Bad Behaviour WordPress plugins, among others). It’s very difficult to force someone to take down a website. It’s a lot easier to make them understand that they shouldn’t scrape yours.

Let me clear up what I think is a misunderstanding. Then I’ll go one further, and if you still think I’m a scraper then, well… that’s your freedom to do.

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of blog scraping but in a nutshell “scraping” happens when someone (usually a computer program called a ‘bot’) copies the content of one website and uses it on another without permission.

I DID copy the above list from the contest site without permission, but I didn’t copy their article. I formulated the above post myself. Small distinction, but still important.

Why do scrapers scrape? Because writing content is hard and it’s easier for them to steal. That said, there’s no value in scraping a list this long. To put Elizabeth’s comment differently, why would I want to announce to 1500 people that I was a thief? Which is why scrapers typically remove links before recycling the stolen content. Not the case here.

Finally, most group writing project creators encourage participants to repost the final list of entries like Jacob Cass recently did. And the participants usually appreciate it, as you can see here. Why is this that? I think my About page already explains it well enough. Hint: *reputable* free links.

So there you go. I hope I was convincing :)

Going the extra mile, I’ll email Susan and Janice to see what they think. If they prefer it, I’ll truncate the list to only a few entries.