No, I didn't misspell mattters, it's just the name of the website I'm referring to. The other day I was checking the stats for Card Boarded on the Blogger dashboard and noticed one of the referring sites was http://hockey-cards.mattters.com/, so naturally I clicked on it.
I had never heard of this site before. Apparently they put together lists of websites with similar content (i.e. hockey cards in this case with Card Boarded), which is a pretty neat idea in my mind.
This is straight from their "About" page:
"Mattters offers easy, single-click access to high quality, real-time, news and stories about the thousands of topics that the major news organizations ignore, but which really, really matter to the rest of us.
Each website and tweep is hand-picked by our staff after laboriously researching, examining, poking, probing and dissecting it/them. Those that are consistantly the most interesting, the most relevant, that have the nicest photos and in-depth news or interesting speculations are preferred.
We don't care if a website is a major website or just has a few dozen visitors each month - if they have great content, we love them!
Its all about helping everyone 'follow their interests'. We hope to make this so easy and fun that we can follow interests we never knew (or had forgotten) we had!"
I noticed a few fellow bloggers are there and I wondered have you ever heard of this site and did you know if your blog was part of it?
Interesting website. I noticed my last post was listed, so that's nice. I'll have to check it out further. Thanks for the heads up!
ReplyDeleteAs a professional web designer, I would bet money that their "staff" does NOT spend time researching our sites.
ReplyDeleteThere is a technique called "scraping", where you can index a site and pull the data (text, images) from one site and post it to another site.
And with most blogs opting-in for RSS feeds, that makes it even easier.
In other words, they are "borrowing" our content without permission. Even though the article snippets link to our sites, they are still potentially making ad revenue on our content.