One of the curses of the web, as far as many are concerned, is automated content web sites. They use automated software to scrape content from wherever they can find it, often infringing copyright.
The makers and users of this software justify their actions in many ways, commonly saying that there is no such thing as ‘original content’, that any site that syndicates (ie provides a feed of) its content is offering that content to anyone who wants to use it, that creating original material takes too long (if you want to make lots of cash).
Why is this bad?
Firstly, it provides a poor experience for the reader. I don’t believe that these automated systems can emulate a human editor. They don’t come anywhere close as a digital piano gets to an acoustic one.
Regular web users will recognise the signs – standard site deisgn, garbled sentences, keywords repeated over and over, superfluous claims, lots of adverts…
It also degrades the whole independent online publishing movement – sometimes we all get tarred with the same brush.
We’ll never eradicate this spam flood – we can just strive to produce better content and hope you’ll get a better information experience as a result.
Here’s what I promise from the Piano and Synth blog:
- We will never use (steal) entire articles unless we have express permission from the original author, and provide a link or attribution as they request.
- We will take selective quotes from other articles, with full accreditation/linking, so as to draw attention to newsworthy articles of relevance to piano and synth musicians. These will be obviously marked as quotations in the body text.
- We do publish full press releases when they are relevant, as these are intended to be widely distributed. We will include all credits, links, etc.
- We use product images from manufacturers official websites, where applicable, including online documentation, manuals, etc. We also use carefully selected public domain clip art images.
- We will immediately remove or modify any article or image that any rightful owner or other authority informs us infringes copyright.
- We provide our own original content, interpretation, commentary and thoughts on this subject area. That’s all the rest of the article space here. If you find this content elsewhere, someone’s scraped it.
- We don’t copyright our material, in the traditional sense. We will be adding some form of Creative Commons licence in the near future.
I hope this clears up any confusion as to the purpose of this web site. Thanks for reading!
