9rules has long been a community site that aggregates hand-picked blogs, representing some of the best content on the web. For a fairly long time, they’ve had public forums called Notes.
Notes has traditionally been a place to talk about stuff and occasionally post links to other places or pictures. Its strength has always been the ferocity and passion that people can talk about things. As long as you’re respectful to other people and you’re not a complete asshat all the time, you can argue anything and I’ve really enjoyed that for the past few months.
Recently they decided that they would stick the “Digg This” javascript widget on the site and while I thought that was pretty useless for anybody, it was done unobtrusively and everything carried on as usual… For a little while anyway.
Scrivs and Mike (2/3 of the 9rules collective) have recently been seeding what can only be described as content posting. By that I mean finding something that is funny on the internet and reposting it in Notes. Some examples include Dark Mario, Son of Mario, Not The Father… Maybe MC Hammer Though, Kermit had an itch… and Unfortunate CD Cover Layout.
So what’s my point? What does any of this have to do with Ebaum’s World? Well EB got rich by reposting other people’s content, often breaking copyright and almost always posting it without giving credit. Most of those links I posted above are exactly the same.
What makes it slightly worse is the submissions of this third party content to Digg. Several of these new types of thread have been reposted onto Digg and unshamedly done well for themselves but the people that deserve the traffic, or at least a damned link, is the authors of these pictures/films/etc. It’s not blogspam, rather just stealing somebody’s opportunity to make money off their own content.
What am I asking? If this really what notes is about? How long until you start watermarking the images with the 9rules logo (ala Ebaums World)?
I know I’m guilty of doing the same thing on several occasions but I will try and give credit where I can and most importantly, I’m not advocating putting it on Digg when it’s clearly not my own material.