Addicted to check your blog stats? I am. Stats on Wordpress don’t just tell you how many hits you’ve gotten but where they come from. Recently there have been some hits from a source I didn’t recognize, Outside.in.
Tracking back to the Outside.in site, it was plain that The Broad Brush blog was being aggregated there, along with others from St. Louis. Checking the FAQ revealed that bloggers opt in. I’d never opted in The Broad Brush blog.
The site did provide an easy to locate link for contacting them. I requested to have the blog removed. Outside.in representative, Esther, has already gotten back to me. Let’s see what she says.
Hi Todd,
We automatically scan RSS feeds of great local bloggers and show only the headline and first 200 words of the story – with the intent of driving traffic to the blogger. We’ve sent you 27
visits since the beginning of November from the Outside.in core site and our Neighborhood News page on STLToday:http://www.stltoday.com/neighborhoodnews
We’re working on removing your feed from our system now, and once it’s removed, we and STLToday will no longer be sending you traffic. I’ll let you know when your stories and links are down.
If you change your mind and decide you’d like to continue receiving traffic from us and STLToday, please let me know.
All the best,
Esther
The tone, to me, is very off-putting. It sounds like they were doing the blog a favor by including it in the automatic aggregation. There is something more irksome to me though, the part about STLToday.
STLToday is the St. Louis Post Dispatch online version. In recent years the Post has tried several channels to aggregate St. Louis blogs into the STLToday site as content. This is an effort to steal the search engine juice from the blog posts and avoid spending time and money creating content. Several St. Louis bloggers argued against this practice, including me. It seems they’ve found another way to do it.
Interestingly, Outside.in, makes no mention on their site about affiliation with STLToday.
Rant off for now. Cheers and heads up out there.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4d21ed68-8163-41d9-bdc4-8747ee65a2d5 "Outside.in Youre Turning Me photo")
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Tags: Add new tag, aggregation, blog, Blogging, blogs, content, Outside.in, Post Dispatch, ripping, RSS, St. Louis, St. Louis Missouri, St. Louis Post Dispatch, StlToday, Web search engine
