I have to be honest. I typically love the Atlanta blogosphere. Tons of great sites abound on our little corner of the internet. However, yesterday a site was brought to my attention that really frustrates me. This site, atlantanewsblog.com (you can copy and paste, I don’t link to places like this), is literally taking entire posts from our Atlanta Metroblog RSS feed and posting them in full on the site (our feed includes the comments, so they’re on their too). It takes other feeds as well and republishes their content on the website as well.

Thrilled to see an Atlanta news aggregator but slightly disheartened to see our posts recpublished in full as they are. I left the following comment on the site yesterday morning (couldn’t find an email address):

Andre –
I’m thrilled to see your site as a news aggregate for Atlanta and welcome you to the Atlanta blogging community. As co-captain of the Atlanta Metroblog, I am glad that you found our site enjoyable to read and use on your site. My concern, however, is in two fold. First, we would appreciate it if you didn’t syndicate full posts. Partial posts, with a link to the original, is wonderful! Also, we noticed that you do attribute the individual posts you use to the author (it looks like you are using our feed and funneling those posts to here). We would appreciate it if you could add an attribution to the site as well, so that it is clear that the post comes from the Atlanta Metroblog site.

We think that this would fully satisfy the CC license we have at our site ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/)
Thank you,
Daniel Moore

I have heard nothing since – and posts have been added to the site. Other actions are being taken by the polysyllabic spree (*) that runs the behind the scenes of our Metroblog.

The thing is, I don’t actually mind people using our posts – and at least this site used the full post including the authors names. Further, I’m no king of etiquette, but it strikes me as a huge breach of etiquette to rip complete posts off of a site and post them on another without the author’s permission. What purpose would anyone have to go to the original site if they could read it elsewhere? Also, a complete list of the feeds used to produce the content on the site should be included. Other RSS feeds are used as well (like from the Atlanta Business Chronicle). Further, it seems like the Atlanta Metroblog posts are the only ones that are recreated in full. I suspect that this is because we provide the entire post in our feeds. This is a service provided for our readers, but not something that should be abused like this.

(*) – term ripped completely from Nick Hornby
P.S. Several people emailed me about this – thanks to all for alerting me.