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Bloggers create Press Plagiarist Of The Year Award
mccalli writes "The BBC is reporting that certain bloggers, fed up of seeing their work just lifted by the mainstream press, have created The Press Plagiarist Of The Year award. Examples are given of national newspapers simply cutting and pasting entire articles from web sites and passing them off as their own."
This isn't only a problem with main stream media taking blogger's content. Main stream media outlets have been taking content off the web and calling it their own for some time.
About two years ago there was a BBC article that stated some incorrect things about angular momentum, and me being a stickler for proper use of Physics terms, contacted the author. He stated that I was wrong and he "knew" it was correct because he had got the information from the researchers. I contacted the researchers, which were NOT listed in the article nor on the page anywhere, after being given their contact info by the BBC reporter. They agreed with me that the use of the term was incorrect but gave some reasons for why they thought it would be easier for the laymen to understand. They also pointed me to their press release on the subject. Lo and behold if their press release was not taken word for word and put on the BBC and tagged with a different author. When I brought this to the attention of the BBC reporter he started ignoring me.
Main stream media has been taking the content they choose and calling it their own for some time. Unfortunatly there doesn't seem to be anyway of controlling this because the media has a vested interest maintaining the status quo.
Well that ends my rant.
How has no-one modded this "funny"?
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What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
As a blogger (I actually started "blogging" almost 15 years ago on my BBS), I believe that the entire idea behind copyright is pretty lame. The income of bloggers comes from 3 mechanisms that really don't make copyright as important, and I think in the future we'll see some interesting google anti-"plagiarism" tools.
Bloggers can make their money from ad revenue (adsense and the like), subscriptions and donations. A good blogger can easily make a low 5-figure income if they're good about consistency. Blogger information tends to be very real-time (even non-editorial pieces). Few bloggers publish book-style information, although this is growing. The audience of a blogger is sometimes one-time visitors, but the goal is repeat visitors. Blogs without repeat visitors in my opinion are failures (but this is disputable).
I believe that google or a competitor is on the verge of "This page is almost identical to" style cross-linking. If an online newspaper posts an exact copy of a blog, or a book author rips off a paragraph from another, the browser toolbars will make short work of noticing it. We are very close with search engine heuristic research to take bigger snapshots than just "completely naked MILF" search tags.
For a blogger to get copied without recognition, I can understand the anger. A newspaper stole their information! So what. The newspaper is dead. All a blogger has to do is mention who is quoted them (verbatim in some cases) and use it to build their following. Sure, being quoted in print might make it hard to find, and if you aren't referenced, then the paper is making income from your work, but NO newspaper could exist for very long strictly on "robbing" content.
Take advantage of the free press even if they don't mention you. Bloggers have something similar to a newspaper in proving they wrote it first: caching search engines and "look backwards" web archives. All you need to do is make sure your blog is getting captured, and you can easily prove to your visitors that you've been quoted in the Floor Avenue Journal.
Frosting? You think the topic of writing is mere "frosting"?
So you are saying that political analysis, teenage diaries, and technical articles are all intrinsically the same because of the format in which they are published then?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha