The comments conundrum: a post by Val the Cookie Queen on Australian Perfume Junkies

I will be back shortly with a review of the latest release by Puredistance, Warszawa - that's as soon as I am able to spell it without looking it up each time - but I just wanted to link to a thought-provoking post by Val the Cookie Queen over on Australian Perfume Junkies today, considering why readers choose to comment on blogs or not:

Comments and Fleur de Lalita by Parfums Dusita

As you may have noticed, every New Year without fail my paranoia about the relative lack of interaction with readers on Bonkers - for example, my latest post has attracted 332 page views to date and...er...4 comments(!) - reaches its seasonal peak. At that time I reach out to readers - and trust me things have to be in a pretty parlous state to even use the words 'reach out', never mind actually do so! - and ponder what this radio silence may or may not betoken. And resolve to carry on blogging regardless.

And then the other day, I got to talking with Val the Cookie Queen about the whole issue of comments on blogs, and how they do seem to be tailing off generally, although some notable sites - like Australian Perfume Junkies, indeed - still act as a watercooler or focal point in the blogosphere, and get a good quorum of comments on a regular basis. We wondered if the cumbersome steps involved in commenting on a Blogger blog might be offputting, or whether the visual feast that is Instagram has siphoned off some readers. If feasts can be said to siphon, though if they are capable of moving, I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But based on the comments coming in so far to Val's post on APJ, it seems that the fall in commenting may not be so much to do with the fragmented nature of today's social media scene, or the physical mechanics of engaging with Blogger blogs (my top theory), but more with people's reluctance to contribute to the discussion unless they feel they have something significant to say. (Which might not be the case with a brand they haven't heard of, like the Civette & Unicorn one I just featured. So I may well have pinpointed the reason for the lack of comments on that particular post!) I must say I did not see that coming. And then I gather other readers hold back because the fragrances in question are not accessible where they live, or are not affordable, or not their kind of thing stylistically / notewise. Others lack the time generally to comment, while a few hold back for fear they might be gatecrashing the 'commenting community' that already exists, like going to a party where you hardly know anyone. I do hope nobody feels that about Bonkers, for the fellow bloggers who mostly pitch in on here are doing so not because we are a clique, truly, even if it may sometimes seem that way. Rather (I suspect!) it is precisely because they are also bloggers that they know how much store I set by any kind of interaction with readers.

And something just occurred to me, namely that the main reason I blog is to entertain. That's it, in a nutshell. The posts are often - but by no means always - hung on a 'hook' of perfume, but the topic could be travel, or the antics of my cat, or a skincare crisis, or a crazy band tour - oh, and I do also plan to report on the upshot of my recent wave of allergy testing for contact dermatitis! But whereas with a stand up comedian the normal rules of engagement are clear, namely to laugh if you find the act funny, and heckle or walk out if you don't!, with the printed word there are no comparable conventions, no set feedback loop.

And I am not sure I have ever fully understood what matters to the readers who stop by here, assuming it wasn't by accident. Plus I may be being presumptuous to even bring up the notion of 'perfume blog as entertainment', which could be purely a figment of my intention. All I know is that if the lack of comments becomes too pronounced (which it tends to by the end of each year, as I say!), I start to question the merit of what I am doing, in terms of quality of output, theme, tone - everything, basically, hehe.

However, by the time the comments have stopped coming in on Val's post, I reckon I shall have learnt an awful lot more about what makes readers of perfume blogs tick, and I would like to thank her for thinking of doing a post on this very subject. It really struck a chord, and as I was part of Val's 'mini-focus group', along with Tara of A Bottled Rose and Thomas of The Candy Perfume Boy, I felt moved this afternoon to write a companion post on Bonkers.

Oh, and notwithstanding all of the above, please don't feel obliged to comment here if you wouldn't naturally have done so. I think my deliberate policy of winkling out lurkers every 12 months in a New Year round up post is probably often enough!

Attack Of The Clones: Bonkers Sees Doubly Red In A Battle With Content Scrapers

This has not been a good weekend. For starters, I unintentionally aquired an orange thatch in place of hair. It was relatively cheap as thatching goes (with it being a dying art of course), but that was no consolation. Plus I failed to sleep, failed to edge the lawn, do a food shop, polish my shoes, or catch up on back episodes of Corrie. In short, most of the household chores and pleasurable activities I had set out to accomplish this weekend went by the board. This is because I was preoccupied by the sudden discovery that a month’s worth of past posts on Bonkers had been hijacked by Israeli terrorists - or by a Tel Aviv-based "content scraper site" (to give it its proper name) – posing as a harmless RSS index directory. Yup, I had been cloned.

Now my blog is already listed on a number of “aggregator” or directory sites like Tree Hugger or Day Life, and I have no problem with any of those. On such sites just the title and a bitesize taster of your post will typically be shown. Readers have to click on the link below - which will say something like: “Full article on (Site Name)” – if they wish to carry on reading, whereupon they are routed back to the original blog post. Thanks to this “titbit”-quoting approach, RSS feed sites are no threat at all to blog owners, and may well serve as additional sources of referred traffic.

As ever, Wikipedia helpfully explains this other, bothersome phenomenon of "content" or "web scraping" – and no, I am not scraping stuff from Wikipedia, just quoting a little bit of it:

“A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping.”

One more sentence if the Wikipedia authors don’t mind, and then I am done.

“Some scraper sites are created to make money by using advertising programs.”

Too right they are! Yes, this one plonked my posts up on its site, hedged them all around with Google ads, and then sat back and watched as the revenue poured in...or maybe just trickled in, one small monetised drop at a time - who knows? Hey, it is the principle I object to, the piggybacking on someone else's time and effort in the hope of financial gain.

So I fired off a pretty stern email to the site owner, in which I came over all UPPER CASE, WHICH IS NOT LIKE ME AT ALL. I will, however, reproduce my complaint in normal text, to preempt mass eyestrain on the part of readers:

“Please take down all content from my blog, Bonkers about Perfume - you have
basically stolen my blog in its entirety for your own purposes and I will
pursue the matter further if you do not remove it from your site
immediately.”

To the site owner’s credit, he responded pretty promptly, asking me for my blog domain name and following this up with further inquiries about the exact web URL of the content I had a problem with. That said, in amongst our flurry of exchanges he couldn’t resist a defensive side swipe:

“And tobe clear we are only rss index directory (no scraping).”

And to be clear, if the lifting wholesale of material, including text and images, does not constitute scraping, I sincerely hope never to encounter a bona fide content scraper in a dark alley.

So anyway, by the end of the afternoon my blog content had been excised from the rogue site – scraped off, no less - though not without the site owner pointing out how I was in fact cutting off my SEO nose to spite my face:

“FYI to be in out site it is good for you SEO & traffice wise but it is no longer relevant for you…”

Note the suspenseful dots pointing to my ill-judged decision….

Well, as it happens, having checked them out, the content scraper’s site doesn’t appear to register on Google’s page rank scale of 0-10 whereas Bonkers is a 3, ie "off the starting blocks", you could say. (For anyone not familiar with this techie blog rating malarkey, Google page ranking is one key measure of a blog’s importance in cyberspace - for more on this see point 4 of my recent post on blogging here. So I fail to see why my ranking would be improved by an association with an unranked site, or for that matter why I would get any referred traffic to speak of, given that entire blog posts of mine were available for people to read over on the scraper site!

Not long after I sent my first tetchy email, something prompted me to click on a link on the scraper site that had previously led to my post on the Perfume Lovers London “Leather Event”; in its place I found a large chunk of what I took to be Hebrew, but at least the Bonkers blog content was gone. My thoughts immediately turned to Ari of Scents of Self, our go-to “in-perfume-community” Hebrew speaker, so I sent her the text and asked if she could confirm it was in fact Hebrew, and if so, whether she could kindly find a moment to tell me the gist. Ari was keen to help, but finding herself unfamiliar with some of the “Internet-y” terminology, she had the bright idea of running the text through Google Translate, and came up with the following:

"There is not even one character of copied content on this site. Display pages are a type of display window that broadcasts RSS within the online conversion of standard RSS to a display state that a web surfer is able to browse. And that every change that occurred in the original broadcast (feed) varies respectively in our website online. The donor site publishers with the broadcast channels are promoting Google and directing visitors. If you still want us to remove the display page of your transmission source, please contact us through the button "contact" and send us the download link."

So they would be the donor site publisher, I take it? Funny that I should feel as though I am the (unwitting) donor in all this...like those bodies harvested for organs without the prior permission of the deceased or their next of kin. And as for this business of "displaying" as opposed to "scraping", well, that is a nice point of semantics. That would also mean that pubs which screen Sky TV football matches using foreign satellite decoders are also merely "displaying" the games, rather than filching them in any more reprehensible manner.

And I find it interesting that this rather pat defensive statement should have appeared where my post had been, instead of being written in an email directly to me. I wouldn't be surprised if this was stock copy the site has got ready to bang in whenever it suddenly incurred a textual hole, as another disgruntled blog owner reclaims their material as their own.

Well, what have I learnt from this unsettling incident? Firstly, that it really does pay to make a direct approach in the first instance to the site which has copied your material, as this avoids having to seek out alternative avenues of complaint that may lie deep within the bowels of Google or Blogger. I also found out that fellow blogger My Perfume Life is being scammed in exactly the same way, and have dropped her a line to this effect. And I have proved once more that I can call upon friends in Perfume Land – even on a "sudden death" basis - for help on all manner of random topics. : - )

Lastly, I learnt (for the umpteenth time!) never to write a post on Blogspot software, even though it supposedly saves drafts as you go along. Beastly Blogger contrived to eat this post completely - or, you could say, to scratch it off the "compose" window with a single gouge of its heartless fingernails - just as I was doing a final proof. Which rather begs the question:

“Where’s the blinkin' duplicate post when you really need one?!”


And I would be interested to know if anyone else out there is aware of having been cloned, scammed or scraped in a similar fashion?

If so, did you take any action against the scrapers, or did you decide to go with the outflow? : - )


Since writing this account of my own experience, Tarleisio of The Alembicated Genie has written a powerful and moving post on the subject of content theft - see link below:

Phantoms in the Fumosphere


Photo of print scraper from drsmith7383 via Flickr CC, photo of boot scraper from sywlch via Flickr CC, other photos my own.

Widgets Behaving Weirdly And Frissons From Further Followers

Mrs Bonkers Senior describes herself as a fair weather gardener. I would describe myself as all weathers non-gardener, and only engage with the shrubs in our very dull front bed when the more aggressive specimens like ivy and cotoneaster threaten to prise open the living room window or even insinuate themselves into the fabric of the walls themselves. Which does actually happen every 10 years or so - prompting Mr Bonkers to launch a frenzied attack on these impudent lianas with a pair of blunt and rusty shears.

Now when it comes to PCs, I would describe myself as a fair weather computer operator. I am completely at a loss when settings mysteriously change of their own accord, and have only the sketchiest grasp of things like html code or javascript. I need to be able to add widgets on my blog as you might place a cherry on half a grapefruit (or you might in 1970, when I last did Domestic Science). If there is anything more complicated involved, like scrolling through the main blogger template till you are cross-eyed looking for a line of code that looks roughly like "p blah blah some kind of brackets data:post.body slash close brackets", or having to open screes of code in Notepad - which I am dimly aware is not the spiral-bound jotter by the phone - well, I simply don't want to know.

Thus it was that last weekend, in the course of my hamfisted attempts to add a Facebook and Twitter share button, I managed to delete some text in a sidebar, and every time I went to add it back in, I got messages along the lines of "corrupted code, insert fresh code", right by that irritating little wrench sign that purports to be for my eyes only. It was all rather distressing at the time, but worse things have happened since, with which I shan't trouble you, enabling me to move on.

On the plus side, I didn't accidentally delete all my followers, who collectively comprise a cheering and colourful enhancement to this blog. Yes, at the risk of coming over all unnecessary, I confess to feeling a frisson of excitement every time a new avatar appears. The cubed montage - I believe it even has a proper name ie "avatar mosaic" - reminds me of those executive puzzles where you slide the tiles around to make a specific formation. As far as I know there isn't such a facility in Blogger, say if you thought someone's avatar was particularly fetching and you wanted to keep it in your top line. The last man in bumps an earlier follower into the invisible panel behind, or that is my impression.

But notwithstanding the shortcomings of followers as a human executive toy, I would like to thank every one of the 63 people on there currently who have taken the time to click on the "Google Follow" button, including the unfortunate person who appears to have lost his or her head, and defaulted to the rudimentary representation by an "X". Maybe they are called Malcolm. No, I have just checked, and the person in question is a lady lawyer in South America. She may need to keep a low profile for professional reasons, which arguably I haven't helped by drawing everyone's attention to her.

Now, round about the 57 follower mark, someone joined and promptly unjoined. At least I assumed it was the same person, rather than the perfectly timed coincidence of one follower joining as another one cancelled. Whatever occurred back there, I never established who had left, or the reasons why. I am trying to make up my mind which is better: someone quitting within the hour or a long term follower deciding they have had enough. The first instance could be down to a simple mistake - you would be surprised how many people find Bonkers about Perfume whilst looking for avocados. They may have hit the Google Follow button in an unthinking moment, only to have immediate second thoughts, once they realised how few column inches are in fact devoted to this nutritious fruit.

As for the scenario where a person leaves after some time - if that is what happened - it must take a lot consciously to decide to strike off a blog. (Almost as much effort as it takes consciously to avoid splitting an infinitive, not that anyone cares these days.) I suspect I am listed as a follower of all sorts of blogs I don't read as often as I would like. But to go back in deliberately and unfollow a blog feels like a decisive act, more so than just unfollowing someone on Twitter whose tweets are swamping your feed.

Consequently, I spent a dark - not quite "night of the soul" - but an early evening at least, trying to figure out why a long term follower might have upped sticks. Perhaps they were bemused by my post about Californian road surfaces. Or the sheer number of posts about California last month. Even readers based in California would probably agree that the attention accorded to their state was disproportionate.

Perhaps I should have put a palate-clearing paragraph in amongst all those posts stating that loosely related perfume features would be along again shortly. But then, if I had done that, and the follower had come back today, they would have seen this post on widgets and followers and been resoundingly confirmed in their decision to leave...

Hmmm, I wonder if I should offer a prize for the 100th follower, if and when that time comes, like the sales assistant in Harrods the other day who handled the billionth pound of sales revenue. Though maybe that isn't such a great idea, as the other 99 may quit in disgust at being passed over, and then where would I be?

But anyway, I promise that my next post will be about perfume again. Or avocados. So, please, don't go away, anyone...or get any ideas from the poster above about changing your avatar to an avocado. That would be rather a lot of green - much like our garden, indeed.