Give Credit Where Credit is Due
Posted by Gabe on June 23, 2009 under Social Media, Twitter | 
17 Comments to Read
I recently wrote a post, “To Follow or Not to Follow” that yielded incredible results (in my world) in terms of retweets and comments. When I wrote it I had no idea it would get that much attention. I figured then I had the key to “How to Write a Popular Blog Post”, (soon to be on the best-seller list), so I wrote, “Is Twitter a Time Suck?“. I honestly thought this would do even better because of all the input from other people, but I was wrong. It garnered a few comments but not nearly as many as the former mention. So I will not be making my submission to Doubleday just yet. Today I figured, why not ask my Twitter colleagues what they would like me to blog about? That might prove interesting. I was a bit uncomfortable posing the question because in my eyes it is a bit presumptuous (like they care what I write anyway) but I pushed on. I received a thoughtful reply from @AmyShropshire: “How about a post on how to properly credit people on Twitter. Seems timely after what happened to your blog post.” “Good one”, I thought. Whether my colleagues are interested or not it should be talked about.
What Amy is referring to is Rule #7 from “Why I Blocked You” from the aforementioned post on followers: “I blocked you because I just discovered that you wrote a blog post a week later that was titled the same as mine and paraphrased my thoughts without any credit. “ This did indeed happen to me. Can I prove it was copied? No – that’s because it wasn’t, word for word anyway. The title was the same, the blog post came out a week later (after mine had gotten lots of recognition) and many of the concepts were the same as mine only abbreviated. They were shortened because we are all told that people who read blogs don’t actually like to read so we are supposed to make things short. (As you can see I don’t necessarily believe that.) And that person was one of my followers. Now can I prove he did anything? No. After all it could have been just a coincidence, right?
The point of this post is not to “out” anyone, but to remind us all to give proper credit if an idea is spawned from another post, web site or tweet. People who plagiarize are going to continue to do it and wouldn’t even read this post, so I know I won’t reach them. We simply want to remind people who might not have even thought of it to give credit to the person who wrote the material that influenced you or that you have used. In fact, it is best to get permission if you copy something directly from someone else’s blog, but at minimum tell people where you got it from. The ironic thing is that my post that was suspiciously reworked somewhere else originally gave that very person credit for partially influencing me to write that post.
If you don’t believe things are stolen from blog posts, then you haven’t seen what happened to Danielle (@extraordmommy). She has a friend who lives in the Czech Republic who happened to pass by a new grocery store that had a life-size picture of Danielle and her family plastered right in their window! It was an ad for the store, done without their knowledge or permission. (Read the entire post here.) That picture originated from her blog. So the opposite side of this coin tells us that we all should be protecting our materials more efficiently.
I’m also sure that the photographers out there would like me to make certain you are not stealing pictures for your blog posts. I get most of mine from I-Stock – I pay a small fee to use each one. It really doesn’t cost that much and it can really add to the flavor of the post you have written.
Now I have also discovered that other people have “pinched” the logo from our Kids Are Heroes web site and used it on their blog. They use material from our web site, without asking permission. I haven’t gone after them because they write very favorably about us and provide a link to our web site. Having said that, most of them contact me to ask permission before they do it.
When I write I try to include references to as many other people as I can. After all, why would someone want to hear only my thoughts when I can provide those of others as well? This also brings these other people back into the conversation which makes blog posts and comments on them more interesting. So it is only beneficial that you give credit where credit is due, even if it is just for the inspiration. Thanks, Amy!
If you have any, kindly share your horror stories in the comments section.
Update: 6/24/09. As I thought about this post and all the attention it is getting early on I thought about what can one do to protect your material. I admittedly know nothing about this subject. I also wondered how would I know if people were copying me? So I Googled a good portion of a sentence in the followers piece and came up with just one result – mine. My guess is that most plagiarism would go undiscovered because people don’t have the time to be that vigilant because it assumes people would even want to steal their stuff, of which many are not convinced (as I am not). Also like me, they wouldn’t know how to go about finding copied pieces other than by simple googling. So, if most people are like me, then their blog posts are very vulnerable to plagiarism. With the amount of people blogging I would also guess that many are not even being read let alone stolen. But then we refer back to Danielle’s case – it does happen indeed.
So in an attempt to offer everyone something on how to protect your material, I bellied up to the Google bar and found this: “Protect Your Blog and Counter Copyright Thefts” a piece by @tibipuiu. He prefaces his post by providing a disclaimer which I respect and also repeat – as I mentioned I know little about the subject. Hopefully I will never need to become an expert on it.
Also just in is a wonderful and informative comment from one of my favorite tweeters Kyra (@milogirly) that has some great detail on how to detect (and deal with) plagiarism. Thanks so much for offering this kind of help to everyone, Kyra!
And as a final note Cory (@corynhughes) sent me a link to a timely post about the editor of Wired getting outed yesterday for plagiarism regarding his book about how content should be free. Fabulous!
