I've noticed a big upswing lately in blogs that pick up posts from my WordPress blogs, apparently without human intervention. I know nothing of their nature, their purpose or their malignancy, and I was wondering if anyone here could fill me in.
Most of these look to me to be recently-established software-driven blogs, as often as not with ".cn" in the URL, that pick up anything that matches a keyword search and mounts an excerpt (typically the first few sentences) on their front page (often with literally hundreds of others a day). To me, the lists of articles that appear have next to nothing to do with each other or with the professed subject of the blogs.
As the excerpts are typically credited, with a hyperlink back to the source i.e. my blogs (most of the time even accurately), and I can find no obvious TOS violations, my state of mind regarding these things is best described as "curiosity" - though I usually consign pingbacks from these sites to spam to be on the safe side.
I would welcome any thoughts y'all might have about this class of blog. Apologies if I'm not being clear, but I'd rather not post the URL of an example here, I think you'll understand why.
