What do you do if another web site is taking your content and automatically republishing it under their own banner without asking permission? This is what you do:
The Shepherd's Bush Blog (deffo worth following, by the way) were more than a little irked to find that their content was being nicked by hyperlocal platform MyVillage.com and republished on the latter's Hammersmith portal without permission. According to Shepherd's Bush blog:
Basically these websites, with their variants of "myhammersmith", "myshepherdsbush" and so on nick other people's content and parade it on their site as if it is their own. They then hope that people will click on the numerous adverts plastered all over the website and therefore make them money. Even better, they want people to pay for advertising space on their websites too.
Their crafty solution? Write a post entitled My Hammersmith are Copy Thieves and wait for it to appear on said site. MyVillage.com quickly removed the post and agreed to stop using Shepherd's Bush Blog's content again. Darryl over at 853 blog effected a similar petard self-hoisting just before Christmas.
If you write a London-based blog, we suggest you check whether your own content is being reused without your knowledge in this way and take similar action.
To be fair, MyVillage are not the only site using these underhand publishing techniques. Far from it. We'd like to name and shame the Ethiopian Review, of all people, who relentlessly plunder Londonist content and publish our articles as their own, completely without permission or credit and despite repeated requests that they stop.
Oh, and just to be clear, the image and quote used in this post were borrowed from Shepherd's Bush blog with their full knowledge and approval.
