An Open Letter To Robert Scoble:

Howdy Mister Scoble,
I was wondering if you're familiar with the Bitacle Debacle (link to Technorati) and what are your thoughts?

Jonathan of PlagiarismToday has a fantastic article on the RSS Long/Short debate. I highly recommend it to every blogger everywhere.

I first wrote about Bitacle in November '05.

And more recently: The Great Bitacle Debacle
Bitacle, They're Making Big Bucks From Your Blog, You Dope
An Easy Way To Stop A Splogger

I've also challenged other bloggers to stop simply being reactionary when it comes to "sploggers" and to become proactive but most seem to fail to understand, preferring instead to rally around sites that pop-up overnight like StopBitacle.org and accomplish nothing of lasting value. For example: the entire text of your blog appears at Bitacle even today.

I chose you for 5 reasons: 1. You'r smart commentary carries lots of weight. 2. Your readership extends farther than most. 3. You're very adept concerning blogging technologies. 4. If there are folks out there with the ways and means to make real change you know how to find them, and 5. In the past you've been very adamant that bloggers set their RSS feeds to display full posts to be read in desktop and online feed readers.

Now that your content is so easily stolen do you think it might be time to reconsider? What do you think of bloggers taking proactive steps to stop copyright infringement and what sort of proactive measurers are available?

And finally, would you or could you get involved in a proactive way, perhaps in helping to establish a proactive organization to fight online Intellectual Property theft?

Thank you, Robert, I look forward to dinner with you and your wife, Maryam at ConvergeSouth coming up in about 3 weeks. It will indeed be a pleasure to finally meet you.

Thanks -Billy Jones

A note to my readers: In the interest of being fair, I have Mister Scoble's e-mail address as we have communicated in the past, but he's a busy business executive who isn't prone to snap judgments so please give him ample time (several hours to several days) to get back to us on this matter.

Update: 12:30 pm I'm surprised at how quickly Robert Scoble has responded to my questions. Sadly, he's at a loss as well. It appears the battle may have to wait.

Tags: bitacle, scoble, splog, technorati, copyright, Intellectual Property, Billy Jones, Billy The Blogging Poet, Poet, google outage

Comments

[darkmoon]

I noticed in trackbacks lately that I've been getting some bitacle.org content stealing. Easy enough. I blocked their aggregator IP and voila. No more stealing. Moronically easy to stop. Of course, this means that you'd have to look through your trackbacks sometimes... oh well. ;)

[Vadivel]

>>In the past you've been very adamant that bloggers >>set their RSS feeds to display full posts to be >>read in desktop and online feed readers.

I guess he has changed his mind long back on this issue :) For quite sometime I am not seeing his Full post in RSS Reader .. it only gives a short intro about what's in store on that particular post.