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Tuesday, November 06, 2007
This Site is Stealing from Secret Tenerife
Having been online for a decade, I learned a long time ago that there's always a price to be paid for success and, the more successful a site is, the more likely it is that its content will be stolen. Secret Tenerife's content and photos are currently being stolen (the technical word is scraped) by a site calling themselves Costa Sun Homes. I'm not going to link to them.
Now, I don't mind people displaying our headlines and small snippets, or quoting me and linking here, or using my photos (with the appropriate credit) to illustrate their own work, but this "automated wholesale stealing" is certainly not cricket. It's theft, pure and simple.
A Spaniard In The Works
Perhaps? (Borrowing the title of a book by John Lennon, said to have been influenced by Stanley Unwin.) The thing is that the "offending" site owner appears to know that what they are doing is wrong because they seem to be putting the text through some sort of gobbledygook filter - or, as was suggested to me, I'd become an expert in Stanley Unwin speak (I've never denied that I write nonsense) - turning it into "Basic Engly Twentyfido", in other words, rendering it incomprehensible and highly laughable, presumably to make it look slightly different, aiming to avoid detection. If the latter was their aim, it didn't work, mind you.
There's always the chance that Costa Sun Homes is actually a spoof property blog, like Unwin's House & Garbidge was a spoof of home and lifestyle magazines. If it was, personally, I'd have called it Costa Packet, but that's by the by. Anyway, I can't wait to see how their terribold mangly filter will Unwinese this, because it's hardly word perfectilode and should be more akin to something written on an old tripewriter. :)
Sorry to take time out of your day, but, assuming that they are doing this via an entirely automated process, then this post should show up on their site too, which will "admit" their theft and hopefully be a deterrent (or at the very least, be even more nonsensical and amusing than usual).
If you are reading this on a website other than Secret Tenerife, then the chances are that you are reading stolen content. Someone else's hard work. So, we urge you to come and visit us direct at Secret Tenerife. Apparently, we're a pretty successful blog about Tenerife. Well, successful enough to have our content stolen and mangled anyway! :)
