The Boston Globe has a piece today on plagiarism and blogs which points to a blog that I’ve been reading for some time now via RSS – Plagiarism Today.
”’A-list bloggers don’t see much copy-and-paste plagiarism because their popularity insulates them,” said Plagiarism Today’s Bailey. ”Unknown bloggers aren’t plagiarized much because they’re undiscovered, and if they are read their content is usually too personal to be used elsewhere.”
So who gets ripped off the most?
”It’s the midrange bloggers, like me and Beth,” Bailey said. ”We’re talented enough and have enough of a base to be known within a circle, but unknown enough to not be recognizable immediately by your average visitor.”‘
This is an excellent article, and a very interesting topic.
I think that the quote you have selected from the piece really hits the true heart of the problem (or potential problems.) It is not the Technorati Top 100 whose content is easily stolen. Take for example the AmBlogger fiasco. Many readers of ProBlogger were quick to recognize and nearly castrate Vince Chan; and his crime was not of content but of design (which could be considered content.)
I think that it is the 200-500 visitor per day blog that runs the risk of being plagiarized. I run two blogs in the “magic middle,” and while neither are popular enough yet to have their content stolen I can see it as a possible problem. The real problem is that with the continually exponential growth of the blogosphere there is such a small margin for finding this type of thing. For example, if someone were to cut and paste a post from The Modern Guy, there is a good chance that it would not easily be seen by any of my readers, unless of course it was done by another mid-sized blog.
But then again, even with the size of the blogosphere there are still very clear niches. I would say that with my other site, Film School Rejects, there is less of a chance for plagiarism. Why, you ask? Because the average blog reader that reads FSR is very likely to also read dozens of other movie related blogs. The potential for someone to pick up on copied content thus increases…
Alright, now that I have somewhat contradicted myself, I will stop… Continue on…
In case some of you are worried about plagiarism and ctrl+c ctrl+v activity, I suggest you to use http://www.copyscape.com, a search engine that searches for copies of your content around the web.
Cool and free to use!
Or do what I do and make sure that each of your blog posts links back to your site. Lord knows I get copied by a lot of AdSense Parrots; the least they can do is give me a few juicy links back!
Its an interesting article with unique topic of discussion. I think its the number of visitors on your blog that runs the risk of being plagiarized. And if u r facing such problem then u may find solution in search engines as they searches the content around the web. Hope this may come to your rescue!
People need to give credit where credit is due. I am more than happy to link back to articles that have inspired me. I never copy and paste other people’s content unless I put it in quotations and leave a link to where I got it exactly. I don’t see why others can’t do the same. It isn’t hurting your blog any to link to your sources.
This is a big fear of mine, as I put my articles out on a few sites for publicity purposes (such as ezine articles). While I don’t get a ton of traffic at the moment, I usually do a spot check to see where my articles are showing up to make sure the resource box is intact.
Jonathan (of plagiarism today) helped me when my work was plagiarised. He has lots of good advice, and his articles are well written and researched.
Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
Howard Aiken
I understand that plagiarism is bad, but it happens everywhere not only online. I don’t think there is a lot you can do, it will be a constant war. Instead of wasting efforts, why don’t you put them in one thing you can do:
Become about average blog, get into technorati top 100! Be happy that your content is stolen, that means it has some value…
Anyone who copies all their content from other sites would be immediately ostracized by the internet community.
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Drmpro.net: http://www.drmpro.net
Padfiles.net: http://www.padfiles.net
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>I think that it is the 200-500 visitor per day blog
I write for a blog that gets several thousand uniques per day, and we’ve just been ripped several times by another site – I only found it because their article came back at me in my news feed! (“Hmm, this looks familiar” I thought)