Voxeo Talks

What do you do when you are running a content farm purely for the sake of generating links and trying to game search engine rankings – and you don’t have enough new and original content?

Well, it seems that one strategy is simple – you go around stealing really old content from other people’s sites!

Of course, what you do then, too, as the content spammer is often remove the original dates which then generates no end of confusion for the company whose content was stolen.

Given that we have most of 10 years worth of Voxeo-related content online, I unfortunately see this type of content-scraping happening all too often – and do get inquiries from customers, partners or others who see the “new” news. I’ll get a Google Alert that mentions announcements that happened 4, 5, 6 or more years ago. Or in today’s social world, they’ll show up as tweets in various Twitter searches I run, like this one:

Now in this particular case, they scraped a Voxeo / Skype / Language Line Services news release from May 2006 about a very cool service that was based on Skype’s initial “Voice Services” developer program that has long since faded into history. Somewhat bizarrely, though, the page they link to is gone and I wind up on a 404 page on some site. Not what I would have expected… but perhaps it is in fact the Twitter account scraping headline content to try to get people to come to its Twitter page and become followers.

I don’t know… and I don’t really have time to care. People ask me why I don’t go after the sites that scrape our content. The reality is that I’ve tried in the past several times and 9 times out of 10 there is bogus contact information and no real way to get in touch with the people behind the site.[1]

Rather than waste my time trying to get content scrapers to pull down our old content, I would rather spend that time generating new content.

Plus, in a somewhat warped way, if they preserve the links to our site and content (and not all do), there is actually a minor benefit in seeing some referrals from those sites to ours.

Is that benefit worth the occasional confusion to our customers and the annoyance of having really old news interrupt our current messaging? It’s probably not. I’d much prefer if the content scrapers / spammers would go away…

I think, though, we’re probably stuck with them. Welcome to our brave new world!

Do you agree? Or have you found a great strategy for dealing with them?

[1] There was one occasion where I did actually reach someone who was scraping our content regularly and surrounding it with their ads. I got the person’s phone number from the DNS registration for their domain and called them up. The person was rather shocked to be called… and we had a very pleasant and educational conversation about copyright and redistribution. They stopped scraping our content.

Join our Developer Jam Session with the topic “Serving the social customer: Scaling your support for Twitter, Facebook and more..”, scheduled for November 30, 2010, 8:00 AM US Pacific, 11:00 AM US Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European time.

Dan York, Director Conversations at Voxeo, will  show you how Voxeo’s tools and platforms can help you scale your usage of social channels. You will learn how to monitor a Twitter account and take action on incoming messages or mentions. You will see how to send urgent notifications via SMS or voice based on certain keywords that appear in tweets. You will learn how you can craft appropriate automatic responses based on what customers send via Twitter. You will see how an automated app can assist the person monitoring a Twitter account in collecting information to provide a response.

And a lot more…

Bring your questions, join the conversation and learn how you can get started NOW with engaging your customers in social networks.

REGISTER TODAY

Flickr credit: stevevoght

We wish all of our customers, partners, developers and friends throughout the United States a very Happy Thanksgiving today!

We are very thankful for all of your support, business and friendship – and we look forward to continuing to find great ways to work together and accomplish more amazing things together over the years ahead.

Thank you – and wherever you are around the world, we wish you all the best today.

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. Our US offices are closed today and tomorrow, but being a global company our offices around the world are still open … and of course our 24×7 support team is always there for you!

Today we are very pleased to announce the acquisition of NetXentry, LLC, and its service WebForPhone. Links to our news release, a FAQ about the acquisition and articles online are available at:

blogs.voxeo.com/news/webforphone/

With this announcement, the tenth in a series of acquisitions, we welcome great customers and a fantastic technical team in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, area into the Voxeo family. As new “Voxeons”, the team is already working with our internal teams and contributing their expertise to the continued evolution of our platform. They are great folks and we’re looking forward to all they will add to Voxeo.

Welcome, WebForPhone!

P.S. As John Amein wrote earlier this year, we have a strong focus on acquisitions and so you can expect that list to continue to grow over time!

This week our partner Interactivation released a very cool “InteractiveXML” toolkit that lets you create videos where viewers interact with the video via voice, text or other channels.

I can’t really explain it… you really have to see it to understand how incredibly cool this is!

First, check out this video where you can call a phone number and interact with the guy in the video (and yes, this is using Voxeo’s network to power the phone interaction):

It’s quite cleverly done. Also… after you’ve tried it out, reload the page and then ignore it for a while. It’s rather amusing what the character in the video does.

Then you can test your 80′s music knowledge with this video that doesn’t use voice but instead has you press buttons or enter text to answer questions:

And again, if you ignore the screen the character gets rather amusing.

Interactivation has released this new “InteractiveXML” language and service to let people create video applications like these. You can learn more about it at, predictably:

http://www.interactivexml.com/

It’s very cool to see and I’m looking forward to seeing what people may do with this new service. Congrats to the Interactivation team on their launch of InteractiveXML!

That’s the question that will be on the mind of the attendees when they gather for the San Francisco Telephony Group meeting at Orange Labs on December 15th on the topic of “Telephony is Sexy“.

The first presenter will be Alex Kaufmann, a recent graduate of NY University’s very cool ITP program that combines art and technology, demonstrating some of his recent projects. I don’t know precisely what Alex will be showing, but the NYU ITP folks have come up with some fun stuff like Botanicalls in the past. It should be fun!

The second presenter will be our own Jason Goecke of Voxeo Labs talking about the new Asterisk “Scalable Communications Framework” (a.k.a. “Asterisk SCF”) that brings scalability, extensibility and performance gains to Asterisk. Jason’s no stranger to Asterisk, having been one of the prime developers on the Adhearsion project for some time now. He recently attended and spoke at AstriCon 2010, the Asterisk developer’s conference where Asterisk SCF was released, and will discuss what Asterisk SCF means for Asterisk-based communications systems.

Does all that make telephony “sexy”? You’ll have to judge for yourself by heading on over to Orange Labs on December 15th and checking it out…