Spooks* - Content Scraping for the Masses

Aaron Wall highlights an interesting article in the New York Times on content scraping that's used to produce completely automated books. With this, and the arguments at the weekend over Shyftr, this repackaging of web content has posed an uncomfortable issue - using unpaid, altruistic content production unethically for third-party monetary gain.

The Shyftr controversy started when the vowel-shy web 2.0 company debuted last week with the USP of being able to pull full articles via RSS from blogs without attribution - so the context (the blog's design, the adverts that may accompany, the blogroll) were gone. Shyftr were reproducing full article content without permission. A funky, web 2.0 version of content-scraping if you will.

Shyftr quickly relented and changed their model, but more than this it posed an interesting ethical dilemma for a number of bloggers.

In a world where many of the same bloggers have argued against big business and their antiquated methods to forestall the adoption of downloadable media in the face of P2P (free music, films etc), it was ironic that the bloggers themselves were suddenly the ones losing their content. (Of course the model is different; music/films aren't usually shared for monetary gain, whereas Shyftr could strip pages of content and then add their own adverts; I'm just playing Devil's Advocate).

And now, Aaron Wall reports, web content produced for non-profit or altruistic reasons can be scraped to "write" books. Well more than that. 200,000 of them.

So is this an inevitable downward slide where the blogpost is used and abused without recognition for the author?

I'm not going worry too much - quality content always wins out, and should "books" of this stuff appear with repackaged content then it'll hit an unavoidable hurdle anyway - the best quality-control available nowadays, the reader review.

As reader reviews replace critic reviews as the major reasoning behind purchases this'll be the peer-reviewed barrier to fake computer-generated content.

• Try and sell rubbish content-scraped "books" and the web community will react.
  
• Try and sell it as a downloadable PDF and Dell Hell-esque sites will spring up.
  
• Try and get the sites that sell these "books" to the top of Google's rankings and there'll be a Google-bombing campaign organised within the hour.
  
• Try and con someone that these books are the real deal and the web communities on Digg and Reddit will call their bluff quicker than you can say "social news aggregator". Hell, Digg lives off this kind of controversy daily.
  

I have no doubt that these "books" will sell some copies, but there's still the quality control (or the quality controversy) that only the internet can provide, and that'll certainly mortally wound these shills, hopefully for good. I await the first content-scraped music or film with interest...

*That's spam books. Better than calling them "spaks" I guess.

Labels: ethos, rss, shyftr, web 2.0