Who knew that when the people behind Naijalive.net decided to set up an aggregator (or an “aggregator” of a different kind, as they put it), their efforts would lead to a discussion about aggregation, copyright and professionalism? What is an aggregator? Is copying and pasting a form of aggregation? Must owners of aggregators seek permission from bloggers before using their content? What are the technical requirements for a good aggregator? These are some of the questions that have been asked and discussed by two Nigerian bloggers and their readers following the birth of a new aggregator of Nigerian blogs, The Nigerian Super Blog. It is the product of NaijaLive Project: The NaijaLive Project is meant to be an interesting, laid back and fresh new approach to building an active Nigerian community on the Internet and encouraging Internet usage among Nigerians. OK Yes, we agree every other guy out there is also trying to do the exact same thing. But, this one is going to be different. We promise. Recently, the Nigerian Super Blog included David Ajao's blog in their feeds. David was not asked for permission and did not want his content to appear on their aggregator. After failing to find their contact information on their website, he wrote a post asking them to remove his blog from their aggregator, “This is to Naijalive.net: Remove my blog!“: This is to whoever is behind naijalive.net I am forced to write this publicly because I have been unable to contact you one-on-one for the following reasons: • No contact information is available on your website • The WHOIS info for the domain name does not contain the contact info of its real owner • I have already left a comment on one of your blog entries but have not heard from you. He questioned the technical nature of NaijaLive aggregator concluding that it is not an aggregator: It is indeed true that blog aggregators help bring more traffic to one’s blog but yours is not an aggregator. You’re simply copying and pasting my full blog posts which is completely unacceptable. Real blog aggregators use RSS feeds. I have set my RSS feed to only share parts of my blog posts and not the full thing. Moreover, David argued that while his content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License, the Nigerian Super Blog does not use Creative Commons license: Remove ALL my blog posts from your website as you don’t have my permission to copy-and-paste my writings. NB. My blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. Yours is not. The people behind NaijaLive Project responded to David’s post expressing their sincere apologies. They posted the apology on their site and on David's blog: Apparently, our methods so far has gone down well with a lot of people yet there are exceptions like yours which we take VERY SERIOUSLY. Once again, accept our MOST SINCERE APOLOGIES for using your content in a manner that has not gone down well with you. Be informed that we removed your blog from our listings (therefore your posts will no longer show up on the Super Blog) and we are currently in the process of deleting all archived posts from your blog in our database. In their open apology to David, they stated that theirs is not an aggregator, “You got that right, ours is not an aggregator. We are only trying to aggregate in a different way.” They also clarified some issues raised by David Ajao: Before I close this message though, I wish to make some remarks/clarifications regarding certain specific portions of your post. You’re simply copying and pasting my full blog posts which is completely unacceptable. Accept our apologies but we are not exactly copying and pasting. Real blog aggregators use RSS feeds. I have set my RSS feed to only share parts of my blog posts and not the full thing. Do you really think we can MANUALLY go through 221 blogs every hour, check for updates and then copy and paste onto our blog? My brother, only a mad man would do that I can assure you. FYI, we use the FeedWordpress plugin for WordPress to automatically aggregate blog content from the RSS feeds of all the blogs in our blogroll every hour. Once again, we use the RSS feeds for each blog. We do have some blogs that are currently publishing excerpts of their posts as RSS feeds and this also show up as EXCERPTS on the Super Blog. If yours does not show up as an excerpt then it must be due to some other reason and not because we are copying and pasting manually! But all the same, we do not say this as a justification and still maintain our apologies to you! NB. My blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. Yours is not.