[Matt Q]

I'm just sent out some poems to a magazine that has just announced a stricter policy on poems that can be found on the web. I thought I'd try googling my poems. I was rather surprised to find two of them. They show up on a site called rssing.com. This site takes regular shapshots of Eratosphere and stores them. The snapshots are visible to Google.

It doesn't appear to store the whole poem, just the start of the thread, but enough that it'll show up if you search on the title or the opening lines, which is what I imagine an editor would do. It does also store a link to the poem on the Sphere, so I'll guess I'll be gutting those threads. It's not taking a snapshot of everything, but it does visit several times a day. Click here to get an example of what's been recently added.

I guess this isn't a massive deal since the poems will usually have been culled by the time the editor gets round to reading them, but not always I guess, and even so, it doesn't seem ideal. Who knows if an editor will investigate further once the poem has shown up in Google? (I personally have no idea).

According to rssing.com someone has signed the Sphere up to this service at some point (they have data going back at least three years) and there is a procedure to complain / sign off. Anyone know anything about this? Are there any advantages to this service?

-Matt