Wow.
Simply wow.
I was looking at Problogger.net today, as I haven’t gone to that site in a while. While there, I found out that there is an all-out war between bloggers based on people “ripping off” other people’s posts and ideas. Tell him, fred.
The players: WebProNews vs. BlogHerald
On Monday, September 12th, Duncan Riley of WebProNews posted The Case against WebProNews. In this post, Duncan rips into Jason Lee Miller, who allegedly has plagiarized ideas and articles from the BlogHerald. From Duncan’s post:
Mr Miller is creative, I’ll give him this, because when he writes he usually tries to put his own spin on things, or as the case may be, re-writes others ideas and presents them as his own, but it really, really pisses me off when time and time again I see anyone presenting idea’s, qoutes or otherwise as their own, and don’t give attribution.
He then goes on to give examples of articles he thinks were ripped off. Then, in the comments, Jason Lee Miller publishes his retort. It now becomes a flame war. And it spills over to other blogs….
So the lesson here is: When you’re incorporating other people’s posts into your own post, link to them. It’s a good thing to do, and it also saves you from being embarrassed all over the web.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jason // Sep 17, 2005 at 3:45 am
let’s not forget to mention that within the thread at problogger that everyone turned against Riley, who was exposed to be a false accuser and a hypocrite, and also made up a quote in a later post that he attributed to me. He also closed the comment thread on his own blog because no one was taking his side, or as he put it, he was “tired of dealing with twits.” All in all, I think it had more to do with me criticising his opinion in an article written a few weeks earlier. Cheers.
2 Barry Freed // Sep 19, 2005 at 4:27 pm
Jason,
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I agree that just saying it was a “flame war” was a huge understatement. Things just snowballed, and it seemed like readers immediately split into two warring factions. Then accusations started flying and it just got out of control. So I guess the lesson to be learned is to 1)Credit your sources when you create a derivative work and 2)Be sure to think things out when trying to defend yourself against an army.
On the other hand, a well-publicized blog war can be a huge PR coup. Believe me, I’m not saying that this was the case here….not at all. But you have to admit, having this little battle brought a lot of attention to these two sites. And many people hadn’t heard about them.
And in this case, since one party had to shut off comments, it appears they didn’t benefit from the attention…
3 blogstring.com » Blog Wars: A PR Coup? // Sep 19, 2005 at 4:52 pm
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Posted on 09.19.05 by Nathan Burke @ 8:52 am
On my personal blog, I wrote about the battle of two blogs. To summarize, I was reading problogger.net, a site I read at least once a mont [...]
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