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LotusLearns steals community content and future of NotesIn9 on YouTube.

By now most people know that lotuslearns.com – no I won’t link to it – is copying blog posts under the misguided banner that they are somehow saving the people of Africa bandwidth. While I painfully remember the days of modems, I just don’t see how that’s possible as the the site contains things like graphics and ads… It even has a score of “C” if you use YSLOW. Not something that seems optimized for modem connections.

The best thing for a modem user I think would be to get a feed reader and INDIVIDUALLY subscribe to the blogs of interest. That could be done my finding sites of interest from PlanetLotus.org or Chris Miller maintains an OPML feed

Since I don’t write many technical blogs any more, my content is a little different. This site is embedded some of my videos from Youtube. While I wish there were some text to go with the video mentioning and linking to my site, I guess embedding videos are a little different then copying an article’s content. That’s so much worse.

Interestingly, I typically dual post the NotesIn9 shows.. The first to my sites, and the second to YouTube. The last several shows I’ve not put on YouTube. It started out as laziness, but it’s a pain in the butt, and once no one complained I just kinda stopped it for now. I’m not sure what to do going forward. Sure I want to be on YouTube for searching, but so few of my videos get played over there I’m not sure it’s worth it. I’ll never use them as my primary host because I want better control of the content and presentation. But I guess now I’m off topic. 🙂

I honestly don’t want to spend any more time on this subject as it’s already distracted me from some work I’m doing to BETTER the community. I’m more focused right now on building up XPages.TV and improving NotesIn9.com and creating shows. I think those efforts would be a bigger benefit to the community then just maintaining a youTube channel. I fear that some bloggers might get upset enough to stop blogging. What a shame that would be.

I’ll just end with a comment that I posted on the site in question. Just in case it’s not approved by the moderator. This was responding to her post justifying her actions.

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RSS Feeds are consent for an INDIVIDUAL to consume the information in the manner that they want. This could be preferred offline reader or even mobile application. They are NOT a consent for a website to consume and then republish the content of the articles in their entirety.

The better solution, if you want to continue to do this might be for you to MANUALLY post SUMMARIES and LINKS to articles that you find might be of value to the people you deal with.

That’s what PlanetLotus does, and it’s worked pretty well for that site. You ARE STEALING this content by republishing it word for word.