Thursday, March 27, 2008

Blog Content Theft

Interesting...

Will just left a comment on my recent Water Purification post alerting me that it had been stolen by a spam scraper site.

Thank you, Will, for the heads up! I enjoyed finding your blog, too, and I'll be back for a closer read :)

Spam scraper site? Still in the grip of my computer ignorance, I had to look up the term. I'm still not sure I really understand it, but I'm clear enough on the concept that someone reprinted my material in whole without permission.

That is one reason I haven't put any of my poetry here, or any of my published writings, not that there are that many of them (there aren't), but in any case I'm sticking to homesteading journaling here.

I formerly belonged to a writers' group, after having shopped several groups in my location at that time, and the one I ended up joining was necessarily kept very small for the sake of the very same thing...the tendency of some folks to be a bit too free and loose with OTHERS' material...and abscond with it. As it was, each of us in the group wrote in a distinctly different style (and often genre) from the others; and yet even so, over the course of time creative similarities showed up in our works, simply from familiarity.

Plagiarism is something I've insisted upon avoiding...with my daughter (in her years of schoolwork), with our family's correspondences, and in my own writing. I really appreciate others citing sources and providing links in some form to give credit where credit is due.

I'll try to contact someone at the spam site (if that's possible?) to ask that my article (though it was simply some ramblings about some water purification questions) be removed and not related to product links.

After a basic Google search, which was necessary since I don't even know what a spam scraper IS, I pulled up this article by Jonathan Bailey , a writer for Plagiarism Today, titled The 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft. It looks pretty helpful, except I'll probably need a Blogging For Dummies guide to get past the first few sentences. Even so, maybe it'll help someone else out here!

If you have any advice or experience with this, I welcome your input! Just make sure to use very small words...lol...and I'll try to wrap my brain around the unfamiliar :)

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