Disruptive Conversations

If you have not read Michael Seaton's post "Plagarism hits The Client Side a.k.a. Scott gets caught", I'd recommend it as a warning for the kind of thing that can happen to any of us.  In it, Michael details the fact that another blogger out there took one of Michael's posts, made a few minor changes to it and then posted it as the blogger's own post without any kind of attribution.  Michael noted another post that was a plagarized version of a TechCrunch post, and as you'll see in the comments, I found that one of the blogger's other posts was also a duplicate - this time of a post from another blog back in June 2006. 

I didn't note it on my comment in Michael's blog, but in the post I found to be a duplicate, the blogger had been rather dumb in that the image (of DropSend usage) that he pulls in is actually pulled from the blog where he copied the text!  I mean, if you are going to steal someone's content, you might want to put the images up on your server so that it can't be tracked back to the source!

But seriously, it's a shame to see this kind of thing.  As noted by Michael, the blogger in question seems to be a senior marketing person at a well known company in Washington, DC.  And here he is posting other people's content as his own.  Michael has asked for an explanation, but so far there has been no word publicly from the blogger.  (Although I'll note his blog hasn't been updated since January 18th, which I think was when Bryper commented on his re-post of Michael's text and that post suddenly came down.)

Time was that unethical people could do this type of thing... "can I copy your essay?"  But in the age of Google, Technorati and friends, you will eventually be found out.  You may have a good run... maybe even a long run... but eventually you will be discovered.  And guess what, courtesy of both Google's caches and sites like the WayBackMachine, your content lives forever. So even if you take down the posts, they are still out.  (And of course, people like me can help in that, as I just used "wget" to grab a copy of the blogger's website.)

There's a very simple solution of, course, which can be summarized in this:

Write your own <insert-favorite-expletive> content!

Need we say more?