What of Learning Signal?

Published by in blogs on October 1st, 2007

I received a comment from the folks running the Learning Signal website a few weeks back, letting me know they were going to start pinging my site as a popular eLearning website and possibly featuring content from my site on theirs. I seem to recall an offer for an “insiders look” at what they were doing. I did not respond. I did not solicit this attention.

I noticed today about 25 pingbacks on my blog from the past few weeks from Learning Signal, and actually visited their site for the first time. One of my posts from last night is featured at the top of their site currently:

From Learning Signal

It appears they are scraping content from different blogs and aggregating it together on their site, which is (not surprisingly) running advertising. I’m glad I’m sharing ideas considered worthy for inclusion on another site, and the Creative Commons license I use for my content DOES permit this sort of reuse/remixing, but I’m not sure how to regard Learning Signal. Does their use of content from other bloggers constitute “blog scraping,” as defined by WikiPedia? I don’t think it does, since they have apparently just selected a few blogs (rather than thousands) to feature and from which they syndicate content.

Does anyone else have an opinion on this, besides the folks at Learning Signal?

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6 Comments »
  • http://www.ijohnpederson.com John Pederson

    Throw in an occasional lolcat. It might shake them.

  • http://christytucker.wordpress.com Christy Tucker

    Learning Signal makes it clear where the original content is coming from and links back to you. I kind of feel like this is just part of having a blog and being out there. I’m frustrated by the ones who don’t link back to me, or worse, attribute my content to someone else’s name. If the information is accurate though, I figure that’s part of the deal with having a CC-By license. I might consider changing mine to CC-NC if I found it bothersome, but I wouldn’t worry about this one. The fact that they told you in advance does show that they’re a step above the splogs.

  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    I hadn’t heard of the term lolcat before, John. Thanks for introducing me to that one.

    I think you are right, Christy. The Learning Signal folks certainly ARE attributing sources well, and are not doing disingenuous things like I’ve seen on other sites that grab content. I’m glad to be on their attention radar screen and those of others, and I am appreciative of their link-back attribution. I’ve considered changing the license terms to CC-NC but haven’t because I have an as-yet unproven but still strong faith in the long term value of people having greater access to my ideas. I think the “old media” way of controlling content will be less relevant in the Internet environment. Maybe I’m wrong about that, I’m not sure.

    Thanks to you both for your comments.

  • http://www.jarche.com Harold Jarche

    My website is under a CC-NC license, so is LearningSignal in contravention of copyright by publishing my stuff? My unprofessional opinion is that it’s OK because all of the information is public. In another situation, I asked a content aggregator to remove my feed:
    http://www.jarche.com/?p=1188

  • http://christytucker.wordpress.com Christy Tucker

    Harold, there’s definitely gray area for noncommercial, but I would think that someone with ads on their site would probably be commercial rather than noncommercial.

    With Human Capital, they were breaking both parts of your license: attribution and noncommercial. Because they made it seem like they owned the content by putting it behind a registration wall, they weren’t really giving you clear attribution. Rereading my comment from the time, I believe they’re commercial as well.

    If you think Learning Signal is a valuable service and the links actually bring traffic to your site, then it’s probably not worth asking them to take it down. If you have a concern with someone else making money from your content though (as implied by the NC part of the license), then you should ask them to take it down.

  • http://www.jarche.com Harold Jarche

    So far I think that Learning Signal is providing a service to the community, and readers are not forced to click on ads, so I won’t ask them to take down my feed at this time.

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