Comments on: Backtype: Scraping comments without your consent and trying to monetize it.

By: Vikas Gupta

Vikas Gupta — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:31:01 +0000

I hate Backtype!

I had a very personal blog and I deleted it but the comments are still there on Backtype! I have written to them thrice but they do not reply!

By: Dean Whitbread

Dean Whitbread — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:50:35 +0000

My comments are mine, I retain copyright in all of them, and I choose to license them (or not) in whatever limited or unlimited way I want – and that is the de facto position granted to me by the Berne Convention
for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Article 6. http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#P123_20726

Robots.txt is NOT a replacement for this law. I would not invest in a business which so clearly invited litigation!

By: Jenny

Jenny — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:18:37 +0000

OK found this post searching “Block Backtype” … is there a way??

By: Melvin

Melvin — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:59:38 +0000

You know I never think about this before – Scraping comments without your consent and trying to monetize it. if it’s not because your article I will never knew that this kind of thing is exist.

By: danny levine

danny levine — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:41:00 +0000

another company in this field is http://www.commentino.com/

By: Nicole Simon

Nicole Simon — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:39:00 +0000

eh yes, sorry about that – I am not that deep a coder to easily change that mechanism without breaking it and i tried long to convince the programmer that normal people have no idea what this is about and why. thanks for making it though ;))

By: a.

a. — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:14:00 +0000

I like your gass pearls-gold metaphor, and I too am not too enthusiastic about these new “services”.

As for the “we drive traffic to your site” argument by CG – that’s nice, but obviously not the point of critique, and therefore not a good sales argument.
Tell me if I got this wrong: besides the “option” of blocking the crawler via robots.txt (or htaccess), which is available only to a tiny fraction of users, a user effectively has to open an account with backtype and start moderating their already-scraped and released comments so that they won’t appear in the stream on backtype. Is this correct?

Svetlana has good points, btw., as they underline that there is often a crucial misunderstanding of what the web2.0 is really. It is not social in the first place, it’s a marketplace where everyone tries to scoop up their little share, and one of the means is to make money with other people’s content (and intellectual property).

(btw. the redirecting to the spammers-suck-website is a bit harsh, as it isn’t self-explanatory of a genuine commenter’s fault. I regularly forget that I need to re-enter captchas and such Gedöns after previewing comments…)

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:03:00 +0000

Google does the same thing right?

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:10:00 +0000

You have raised a very important issue here that really should be addressed. A commentator really has no say about if he or she wants the comments to appear on BackType: a blog owner can block the blog for robots but how is a commentator supposed to do that? I have very limited knowledge about the way crawlers operate but I don’t think I can forbid them to crawl something on a 3rd-party website I have no control over.

But if they base the service on only those users that choose to create accounts, they will have a very limited reach that will be no use for any brand managers at all so it’s kind of understandable they won’t limit the content pulled in any such manner.

By: Nicole Simon

Nicole Simon — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:50:00 +0000

The hypocritical part is that they especially make the T&C that whatever is done on their plattform is not to be scraped. If I would be somebody with existing T&C like this, I’d search. And every instance I find I’d make a nice letter of it.

[I like search engines. I like services who provide me with value. I just dispise being given glas pearls in exchange for gold and treated like I would not see the difference.]