ON BLOG PLAGIARISM

BOTTOM-FEEDING PARASITES

Fred Wilson posted on an instance of plagiarism from his blog today.  It's a pretty sad instance of this site essentially scraping posts from various sites to make up a "content-rich" blog in order to earn advertising dollars.  If you go to the site, DON'T click on any ads there...otherwise, the thief benefits.

Thanks to a comment by Ken Norton to the above post, I realized that this dude also scraped a post from me with no attribution.

The process almost seems automated.  For example, the title to my "re-purposed" post was "Om Malik going to acquire Teleo", which obviously makes no sense.  The original post had to do with Microsoft allegedly buying internet telephony start-up Teleo.

The site looks abnormally normal, with even an "email me" link to the author.  I'm not sure if it works.  Given the pre-ponderence of India related ads, I'd almost say the author is doing this out of India.  Talk about off-shoring uncool behavior.

P.S.  On a totally separate note, my previous post today on a cool application of tagging touched on the possible spamming opportunities.  Ken Norton has a sobering, nuanced and at times hilarious post on that topic already today.

Comments

[Michael Arrington]

This is just such a slimy thing to do.