Bitacle Starts Name Calling

When Sparklepanda posted an entry on her blog about her young son just starting to stand up and learning how to walk, she got a lot of the comments you’d expect, including discussion on child proofing ones home and the dangers of climbing children.

However, one comment from an anonymous user stood out. It was in Spanish, though the rest of the blog is in English, and said:

“Pero que puta eres, y tu hijo es un hijo de puta bastardo de mala madre.”

Roughly translated, it says:

“What a whore you are, and your son is a bastard son of a bitch of a rotten mother”

It didn’t take Sparklepanda long to track down the source of the comment. Once she researched the IP, she discovered the souce was none other than the old blogger nemesis Bitacle.

Change in Tone

If this comment is indeed from Bitacle, I am hoping to work with Sparklepanda to validate the source, it marks a major shift in tone for Bitacle.

Up until then, they had been relatively silent. To my knowledge, they had not posted any comments nor answered any emails since July. Furthermore, back then, their behavior was relatively civil in nature.

Sparklepanda gives no reason given for Bitacle’s sudden backlash against her, she had not posted on the subject before. However, it appears likely that an email sent to Bitacle might have been what got their attention.

On that note, to date, Bitacle has not contacted myself or any other major Bitacle opponents.

What it Means

The comment (once again, if proved to be from Bitacle) could mean any number of things. Most likely though, it is a sign that the backlash and anger directed at Bitacle is finally starting to break through.

To date, they’ve had their Adsense account cut, they’ve become one of the most hated names in the blogging world and, judging from Alexa’s stats, are both losing traffic and are running incredibly slow (86% of all sites are faster).

By all accounts, they are losing more money and traffic the longer they stay up.

This isn’t to say that the end is near for Bitacle, but that the writing is on the wall. It doesn’t cost much to run a site these days, but with no revenue and shrinking traffic figures, things don’t look good over the long haul unless something major changes.

Personally, I think this would be the fate of Bitacle even without the copyright issues. There are simply too many Netvibes clones out there for a slow, amateurish one to survive.

Bitacle may hang around for a while but, barring a major shift, I don’t see it surviving in the long term.

Conclusions

In the end, the moral is that anti-Bitacle bloggers now need to be on the lookout for immature Spanish-language comments by anonymous posters.

It’s sad that the Bitacle issue has gotten this petty, but I, for one, am not shocked. What can you expect from a company that wants to make a living on infringing blogger’s copyrights and search engine spamming?

Not much.

 

Tags: Content Theft, Copyright, Copyright Infringement, Copyright Law, Plagiarism, RSS, Scraping, Spam Blogging, Splogging, Bitacle

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