I’ve been splogged…

I had an interesting experience this weekend. I found one of my videojournalism postings in its entirety on another site without attribution, although there was a link that just said basically to see original click here.

When I emailed and requested that my work be taken down because I believed it was plagiarism without the citation, the site owner – Gideon Kimbrell of syragon.com – gave the following response:

It’s not plagiarism. It’s content indexing, and you published your blog so we syndicated it. We nonetheless have removed it, out the goodness of our hearts.

Below is what he posted on his site after taking down my posting. You’ll have to click on it to enlarge enough to read, but the synopsis is he took it down because he is such a nice guy and I’m ignorant and shouldn’t complain.

I did a quick check on splogging, since I generally live with my head in the sand and focus on my own business. Plagiarism Today had an extremely informative article.

So sploggers are parasites who steal the work of others. I guess I was lucky he even linked to my site…from what I gather they generally just steal wholesale.

To protect yourself from raids such as this one, I recommend you do what I do from time to time. Cut and paste a unique sentence or partial sentence from one of your more popular posts, place within quotes, and Google. Then, if you see your work under someone else’s name, complain. I did this last year when alerted there was a plagiarist using my blog postings and was able to get the postings removed and the site taken down.

Can’t guarantee you’ll have success…and you may also be vilified. The trick is to not allow words to get under your skin…do what you have to do and move on. If enough folks help police the cyberworld, we may stand some chance of keeping it honest.

Final word of advice – back up your files. Frequently – or as frequently as you post. Just in case. WordPress has a handy backup tool in their “Tools” setting…so if the worst happens, I’ll be back up with a simple import (thanks to Richard Koci-Hernandez for that information).