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March 26-29, 2012, Software Test Professionals Conference, New Orleans
July, 14-15, 2012 - Test Coach Camp, San Jose, California
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Thursday, February 08, 2007

Blogger Etiquette?

Someone mirrored one of my posts from earlier this week -

http://managerspeaks.blogspot.com/2007/02/rethinking-process-improvement.html

At the bottom, he wrote "link", linking to Creative Chaos. Otherwise, I would think the material was his.

Now, when I quote someone, I quote part of the article (not in it's entirety), I put it in italics, and I make a descriptive link, like "From James Bach presentation on bug metrics"

I suppose it's neat if people are copying me, but I am a little alarmed at the way this was done - it's not too much different than the google link trollers that spider websites to create content. What do you think?

3 comments:

Ben Simo said...

What do you think?

Bad etiquette. Bad ethics. Credit should be cleary given to the author.

Your not the only one. That blog appears to have no original content. All the links to other entries that I clicked took me to content that was copied and pasted from another source. There is no acknowledgement given to the source except for a little "Link" or "Read more" link at the bottom.

And the blogger has at least one other blog that is the same compilation of other people's work without clearly stating that the content belongs to others.

I too am alarmed.

Kerry Buckley said...

Looks like blatant plagiarism. For what it's worth, this article lists a few techniques for dealing with this sort of thing.

Elisabeth said...

Yup, I agree with Ben and Kerry. It's gross, blatant, plagiarism.

Though I did note that the particular article you pointed to now 404s. So apparently the blogger took down your content. But other postings continued the pattern of ripping off entire postings from other writers without credit and with a measly little "link" at the bottom. So apparently the blogger hasn't learned that a teeny link labeled "link" is just not sufficient to count as attribution.

If there were more commercial content, I'd think it's a Fake Blog done by a truly lazy marketer or PR person. But since there appears to be no promotional purpose to the blog, not even self-aggrandizement (as the blog is anonyomous), I suspect it's cluelessness on the part of the author.