Friday, September 5, 2008

Someone has been Stealing My Work

I want to thank one of my clients for notifying me that an anonymous blogger was stealing my work by publishing my articles without citing me as the author or linking back to my blog.

They took this post about Law School Personal Statement tips word for word and published it at http://www.thefreeday.cn/article/hairdressing/2008-09-05/3760.html.
They did the same with my popular guest post by Marni Lennon about public interest law
and published it as their own work at http://www.thefreeday.cn/article/hairdressing/2008-09-05/3761.html

I'm asking all of my loyal readers to leave comments on this article pointing back to my blog so that people who find these articles in google news's a.m. push are directed to the source and these plagiarists are not allowed to get away with stealing content.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Ann,

    This looks like the work of a "rogue Web crawler," and not that of a specific person. These are programs designed to "crawl" through millions of Web pages searching for content (openly available via RSS) that they can use to draw readers to their own site for various reasons (usually to boost site traffic and attain online advertising dollars). Any blog with RSS capabilities is especially susceptible to programs of this nature. There are ways to combat this, such as limiting the content from your RSS to just a teaser.

    Hope this help!
    Chris H.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Chris! I'm an expert on law school admission, but not on how the web works : )
    I appreciate your insights and will pass this along to my tech manager....

    ReplyDelete
  3. Another blog I read, Baltimore Snacker, had this problem, and they inserted a tag at the bottom of their posts that will show up when their work is stolen. It says, "Post taken directly from the Baltimore Snacker website. If you're not reading this on a feed then you KNOW the "person" who put up this spam site didn't write it!"

    ReplyDelete