Web Courtesy; Don’t We Deserve That Much?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 13, 2010
Once again yesterday I discovered that someone had pilfered one of my business blog’s posts from November and presented it as pretty much his own ideas. Well, maybe that’s not quite fair. After all, he did say he was reading a column that he had agreements with, then proceeded to write his post, using at least half of my words for his article. Kind of a rewrite, kind of a plagiarism that I still wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not.
I wrote a comment on the post saying I wasn’t sure whether to be mad because some of my content had been stolen, or happy that he had at least read the article. What I was thinking, however, is that I was upset that I hadn’t gotten any attribution for writing the article in the first place.
We all love having someone notice what we write. It’s pretty neat when people comment on our blog posts. It’s even neater when we find out that someone has written something based on an article of ours, and has linked to it in some fashion. Sometimes, even if they disagree with what we wrote, we love the fact that they’ve taken the time to talk about our stuff.
I like to think that I’m pretty good at linking to people whenever they write something that sparks a blog post to occur. I hope that whenever I do it that some of you follow the link back to the original article to read what that person had to say. I actually hope that sometimes you leave a comment there showing your appreciation for what they wrote, and mentioning where you might have seen the link to their post.
In retrospect, I might have been a bit harsh with the guy who wrote the post based on what I wrote back in November. After all, I found that same exact post on another site as well, and that site copied the entire post. That site has copied other total posts of mine as well; someone wrote me once saying it’s a foreign site that’s supposed to be similar to Digg, but I’ve never heard of Digg posting someone’s entire article. I could be wrong on that one.
I’m not giving these people a link, but if you want to see the site I’m talking about it’s here: luacheia.soup.io. And this is the direction to the latest post I know they took from me: luacheia.soup.io/post/33702719/Three-Syndromes-Consultants-Face. Part of me is wondering how many of my blog posts are on that site; I wonder if any of the posts from this blog are on that site. And in case you’re thinking about asking, I did write these people multiple times; no response. The hosting company is who told me they’re like Digg and that they can’t do anything about it; that just seems so wrong.
Blogging really is about community, in my opinion. When we can, we should open up our community to others whose stuff we read. Some folks do that once a week, like Kristi and her Fetching Fridays posts. But everyone doesn’t have to go quite this far. Think about how good you feel when you know someone has been inspired by you; do the same for others.



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.-= Kikolani´s last blog ..Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Internet Marketing Internship =-.
Mitch Reply:
April 13th, 2010 at 12:21 PM
The question is what can one do about it?
.-= Peter Davies´s last blog ..Internet Marketing Or Internet Selling? =-.
Mitch Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 6:44 PM
Really, it is not hard to place a link back if you are referencing somebody else’s work. Stealing an article, word for works, is just wrong. No matter how easy it is to do.
.-= Scott Thomas´s last blog ..Weeping Willow =-.
Mitch Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 6:47 PM
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Mitch Reply:
April 14th, 2010 at 6:42 PM
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April 15th, 2010 at 1:12 PM
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Mitch Reply:
April 15th, 2010 at 1:13 PM
Mitch Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 5:12 PM
I was somewhat upset, but then almost felt honored.
And being new, she may have assumed it was one of our teams ads that were created for all to use.