Meet the Rehashed, Remixed, Warmed-Over Web

A lot of Web content this year has been copied, repeated, or mashed up from someplace else, IDG's InfoWorld reports

By Robert X. Cringely

San Francisco - Stop me if you've read this one before. Actually, stop me if you've read anything at all original on the Web over the last year. Odds are whatever you did read was copied or repeated from someone else, who took it from someone else, who took it...and so on and so on.

Is it just me being especially cranky, or has the repetition problem gotten much worse lately?

This is how 99.7 percent of online "news" now seems to operate: A story is published by a legit or semi-legit news source, and everyone else leaps upon it like a pack of snarling hyenas, trying to tear off the biggest hunk of traffic before the next hyena gets there. Maybe they add some commentary or insight (or—ahem—a healthy helping of snark), but the overwhelming majority just repeat the same details, endlessly, in a 400-word SEO-enhanced snippet.

Quality writing and reporting? Feh. It's all about slapping something Google-friendly up on the Web as cheaply and quickly as possible. This used to be true only of bot-driven Web-scraping splogs and bottom-feeder bloggers. Now everybody—even large, legitimate sites from major publishers—is under pressure to do it.

The backlash finally hit this year. In June, the Associated Press threatened to bring the hammer down on any sites that copied its content without paying for it. In fact, if you want to quote up to 25 words from one AP story, it will cost about the same as a large pepperoni pizza: $12.50. Want to use 100 words? That's two pizzas and a side order of garlic toast.

That scheme earned a big Bronx cheer from bloggers, as well as a "good luck with enforcing that one, dudes." It's the same thinking that's driving News Corp. and other media companies to erect pay walls in front of their content and to shut out Google. And as more publications go belly up or teeter on the brink, you can see why they'd want to.

But copying a site's articles can actually be good for the original site, argues Derek Ball, CEO of Tynt Multimedia, whose Tynt Insight service is used by Web publishers like Sports Illustrated and Esquire to track every piece of copy that's lifted and used on another Web site.

Tynt doesn't want to be the copyright police, says Ball. Quite the contrary—it wants to encourage copying. Because copying inevitably leads to traffic, and traffic is what every publisher desperately wants.

Copy material from a site that uses Tynt Insight, and it will automatically place a link and any promo text the publisher wants to add to it along with the quoted material. For example, take the following snippet I copied from an SI.com story about the Dallas Cowboys ruining the New Orleans Saints' perfect record:

Romo got the snap, looked over the coverage, saw Austin get inside McKenzie on a quick slant toward the post, and zzzzzip, he threw the ball to Austin in full stride eight yards past the line of scrimmage, just enough for the first down...and more. Austin ran for 24 more yards.

"In that situation," Austin said later, "I can hear myself think, but that's all I can hear. You've just got to trust the route you run and the throw. Tony put the ball right where it needed to be."

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/peter_king/12/20/mmqb/index.html?eref=sihp#ixzz0aLQdR7Q0

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