Oh how I’ve missed you Sunday Salon post. With my crazy schedule this year I haven’t been able blether to you like I’ve wanted! Now that I’m back on track we can share a pot of tea and have a lovely wee chat!
I have a question for all you lovelies out there in bloglandia: Is originality, creativity, and the ability to have an independent thought dead? Has it been replaced by the effortless and ignominious act of nicking someone else’s work and claiming it as your own? Have people become so lackluster in their thoughts that they have to encroach on someone else’s work? Because I’ve been seeing a horrible trend as of late where the content from one blog has appeared nearly verbatim on another nonrelated blog, sure the font has been changed, but the content remains the same, and I not going to be naming names or pointing fingers, but shouldn’t bloggers respect one another’s post and content enough not to abscond with it then claim it’s their own?
While this hasn’t happened to me, I’ve noticed it when reading other blogs. Just take this morning for instance, I was reading through a blog post that was published Friday on a blog that was less than a few months old. As I was reading through the post, I had an odd feeling that I had read this before. Having a vague recollection where I might have read it at, I searched through the archives of a rather well known blog and sure enough there was the post I had been reading. It had been published (complete with time-stamped comments that verified the post was posted on the date listed) years before the post on the newbie blog which claimed the content as their own.
And it’s not only blog posts and reviews. It’s review/blog policies, rating systems, and—my absolute favorite—disclaimers stating that if you nick this content you will be punished (but they fail to mention that they nicked it from the blog they just read).
So my final question to you my lovelies would be: If we, the readers, see that content had been nicked from another blog/website, what should we do? I’ve had numerous discussions with family and friends about this same topic and I would love to hear your answers.
2 comments:
Unless I actually have read something myself that has been nicked from my blog or somebody has alerted it to me specifically, there is really is no way to make sure. I personally don't take whatever one has written and then post it on my blog without saying that I got the words/idea from that blog. There has been the odd occasion where I have found a review on goodreads and it expresses what I thought about a particular book and I use it as my own words, but that has been very rare. For the most part, I do make sure that I let people know where I got stuff, especially book descriptions, which aren't my own, but rather somebody else's words.
Great post! And great thoughts about blogger's work. With cyberspace,it seems everyone is at risk for having their work copied, whether it be photography, logos, artwork, posts, etc. I just have enough faith in believing that there are more honest bloggers than not. P.S. Welcome back!!
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