Crawling for
references
Looking at my blog
statistics today after noticing a sudden spike that had already doubled the
number of views yesterday, I checked on the traffic sources and
impacted pages with piqued interest.
The prominent page appeared
to be someone searching for all the blogs I had written about my dear friend Dick
van Galen Last who passed away just over a decade ago.
However, I could not
help but notice another blog that represented a dispute about blog aggregation
in July 2007. I had noticed that a site many bloggers of that time subscribed to
was down, the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA) referenced hundreds of Nigerian
blogs, showing the headers of the latest blog and linking back to the source
blogs.
When aggregation
turned sour
It appeared the
owners of the blog, which was free allowed it to fall out of maintenance with
an error pertaining to the lack of disk space. The domain is now parked, but
not in use.
A carpetbagger cohort
in the demise of this NBA aggregator decided to launch the NaijaLive SuperBlog that
the movers with all good intentions executed quite badly. They published our
blogs without reference, attribution, or citation whilst taking commentaries to
our content without feeding back to the source blogs.
After a bit of back
and forth, I asked for my blog to be removed from their curation because I
thought what they were doing was unprofessional and unethical.
For the passion of
blogging
Revisiting the whole sordid
episode today, it is interesting to note that the NaijaLive SuperBlog did not
live up to its promise, it is now an entertainment site without anything
particularly entertaining there. Oluniyi
D. Ajao still has his blog running now as Tech dot Africa and Global
Voices Online ran a piece about the dispute.
It is a shame that I
have not found a service that provides the kind of blog aggregation we are
happy to subscribe to, and many of the competing platforms then have failed.
For many, it is was a passing fad for which they had no passion or purpose,
they simply coasted on the content of others to gain influence and maybe
credibility.
My blog remains a
non-commercial and personal vehicle of expression, we were not looking for popularity
or traffic to boost our egos, we just knew and enjoyed what we were doing and
simply demanded the courtesy of being informed of having our content curated
and presenting the same content differently only after agreed consultation.
The blogs below take
you back to the history and events that ensued. The NaijaLive is lost because
for all their bluster, they could not keep their side of the bargain.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are accepted if in context are polite and hopefully without expletives and should show a name, anonymous, would not do. Thanks.