Markos Alberto Moulitsas Zúniga, otherwise known as the Daily Kos, is the self-proclaimed “highest-trafficed (sic) political weblog.” He’s also one of biggest idiots in the Blogoshere. Which is only part of the reason why he is on my Miserable Creatures list.
Now it looks like the biggest fish on the Left-side of the Blogoshpere is stealing bandwidth from one of the smallest fish.
From Joe Sherlock:
The Daily Kos, a blog which allegedly gets 500,000+ visits per day, has posted something from my little blog on his. Sort of. What he did was set up a page (on July 11th) that pulled one of my graphics directly from my server, using my limited bandwidth to fuel part of his big blog so to speak. No credit, acknowledgement, hat tip, or link to my site, however. (Thanks for nothing, jerk.) The only way a viewer would know it came from me would be to examine the html source code on Kos’ page.
Kos proclaims – on the ‘about’ section of his site – that his liberal blog is “the highest-trafficed (sic) political weblog.” And he has lots of money-making paid ads. Despite all the cash coming in from blog-ads, his store, etc., this cheapskate is doing the equivalent of siphoning gasoline from my little old Plymouth coupe to fuel his big party limo. Talk about a Limousine Liberal!
One of the problems with Hotlinking to someone else’s images, is that the person hosting that image for you can decide to change the image. Which is what Joe Sherlock decided to do.
When I checked Ko’s site this morning, he had still not changed his site, and he is still stealing bandwidth. I’m sure he’ll change it soon enough. But for now, here is Joe Sherlock’s response to hotlinking:
Click image for larger view.
h/t: Michelle Malkin
Okay, you obviously aren’t familiar with Daily Kos. That post has nothing to do with Markos. Basically, at Kos, anyone can get a diary. All you have to do is hold an account for a week, then you can post your own little mini-blog on his site. That’s partly why he gets so much traffic, bout half a million visits a day. It’s not just one blog, it’s a lot of them. Certain posts from the diaries get featured on the main page, but the vast majority don’t. This post was just some guy’s diary. It didn’t even get featured on the main page (I just checked the archives). If you really wanted to, you could create an account and, in a week, start hotlinking tons of pictures. It’s got nothing to do with Kos…
No. I understand DK’s model very well. And the bottom line is that it’s Kos’ site. He can controll everything that is posted on his site. He choses not to.
Did you look at the screen shot? Did you see the DK banner that this diary is flying under?
It doesn’t matter who the author that posted it is…Daily Kos is knowingly facilitating the theft of bandwidth.
If you post something on my site that is proprietary or copyrighted (you know, stolen), I have a delete button. So does Kos.
Do you know if Kos is aware of the situation? I mean, if he’s not deleting something he doesn’t know exists, then it isn’t really his fault. Trust me, this isn’t some purposeful attempt to hurt anyone. Kids hotlink all the time. Visit any message board, you’ll find tons of it. Most of them don’t even know they’re doing anything wrong and have no idea where they can go to get their images hosted properly. This guy’s just trying to get some cheap attention for his blog. Anyway, the guy who originally did it realized his problem, and apologized.
Someone in a similar situation posted a close up of genitalia with sores. That got their attention fast!
Markos knew about it. And his response was a shrug of the shoulders and a “not my responsibility” statement…which is bullshit. I blame Markos more than the diary author (whom probably didn’t understand the ramifications in bandwidth usage caused by hotlinking)…but Kos understands it perfectly.
I would blame them both, in that I have to believe all the diary authors are given a set of rules. Ultimately, it is Kos’s responsibility.