Blogging Etiquette - How NOT to Make Internet Friends
Came across an interesting find in our server stats this morning - someone ripped off one of our articles and posted it on their blog without giving us credit. Luckily they were too lazy to remove any of the links in the article (and one of them links to another of our articles).
Here’s the deal…
Steve and I are ALL for sharing knowlege, especially when it comes to environmentalism, BUT for crying out loud - give credit where credit is due! One thing we always do here on our blog is make sure we’re providing links to any articles we discuss, reference books we’ve used etc. Aside from being the ‘right thing to do’, its just common courtesy!
Anyway - I don’t want to make this into TOO much of a negative diatribe. Truth be told, it looks as though the offender has already taken down the article so that makes me happy (although I would have been perfectly happy to let them use it with proper referencing).
So, some lessons to be learned from this? 1) Its always a great practice to link to other related articles on your site (so if the thief is lazy you will see the incoming link. 2) Its not a bad idea to think about using a service like Copyscape to help deter people from engaging in thievery (and also to alert you when someone DOES take some content), and of course last but not least - 3) Don’t take people’s content! All you have to do is email them and ask if you can use one of their articles - I’m sure most people would be cool with this, provided they received credit for it (ourselves included).
Ok enough about that!! Time to move on to greener pastures!
Technorati Tags: plagiarism, copyscape, thievery, blogging, etiquette
Written by Bentley on November 3rd, 2006 with
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