Bug-Man’s Blog

Ever done an ego search? That is, searching for your own name in Google or some other search engine to see what comes up about yourself. I was doing this tonight. I googled ‘bugmancx‘ which is a username that only ever applies to me. It’s great, though. It shows up my YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc all in the top results. But if you continue down those results you start seeing some really weird stuff.

It all revolves around the concept of tags. To sum it up basically a ‘tag’ means the keywords you apply to any video you upload to YouTube or image that you upload to flickr so that people typing in something like ‘eiffel tower’ can find your image of the eiffel tower. It seems that in order to draw people in, websites are making use of this tagging technology by using the tags of successful websites like Flickr and YouTube. Before I even reached the end of page one of ‘bugmancx’ I’d come across websites like www.adelaideindex.com and www.gnosh.org which all trawl the web looking for content to re-display.

Re-display? Well these websites are using the tags to re-display content from the internet that already exists elsewhere. For instance, the gnosh.org site basically picks up on Flickr tags as well as many other image sites and shows you the results in one page. While this might be handy it means that every time I upload new photos to my Flickr profile they’re appearing in Google results on varying sites all over the web.

I suppose this is a smart way to re-engineer and make money from things that already exist on the Internet without breaching any terms and conditions and without having to do any actual work. I did feel quite some annoyance when I started seeing my YouTube videos being displayed on websites using the YouTube HTML include functions and being surrounded by Ads. A few of my videos are even featured on ‘AOL Videos.’ I put those videos up on YouTube for my own entertainment and enjoyment, and not so they could be plastered all over the web for other people’s financial gratification!

Look out people! It’s true when they say that once you upload something to the Internet it’s up there forever