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Copy & Paste Blogging

By Alexander Russo — February 28, 2007 1 min read
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The next time you see a big chunk of quoted text in a blog post, ask yourself why it’s there. Is it concern that the link (to a newspaper, say) might expire or become outdated? Is it a sincere desire to create reader convenience? Or is it at its core simply a blogger wanting you to stay where you are and worrying that you won’t come back?
For whatever reasons, it seems like it’s happening to me a lot more. In recent months, folks have taken big swaths of my “HotSeat” interviews and posted them in their blogs. Two weeks ago, someone liked my “Hot For Education” post so much that he copied and pasted all the pictures that I’d gathered into his own blog. Yesterday, someone else thought that a one of the things I’d dug up was so interesting that it, too, should get copied onto his site in its entirety.

In every case, these bloggers credited me and provided a link. But that’s not really enough, since they’ve effectively bypassed any need for you to come visit, which is how blogs measure their impact. Intentional or not, copying big chunks of text like that is ripping off whoever found or wrote or bothered to post the material in the first place.

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