I did a trackback using my web traffic data and found a link on someone’s blog (who links to this one) to another blog.
Now, I would hope that this blog has maybe inspired a few other people to set one up of their own - whatever walks of life they might come from. But I was a bit surprised to find one which has almost the same name as mine, and which seemed to draw on some of my articles for its own content. It even has a similar tagline.
I wonder if I should be flattered or offended?
I think I’ll go with the first one. After all, it might just be a complete coincidence – there are bound to be common topics in this business.
On the subject of plagiarism though, I once went round to a friends house to fix his son’s computer. I had to wait while the lad printed off his homework – it was the entire Wikipedia page about Shakespeare. The worrying thing is that he probably got an A for it.
As for web forums, people seem to think that cut-and-paste or just linking to articles somehow reflects on their own knowledge and intelligence. Weeeell… it does… because in most cases - if you trouble to follow the link and digest the content (or find the full article they cut-and-pasted from) - you inevitably find that they simply haven’t understood what they’ve posted or linked to. In many cases, they clearly haven’t even read it, let alone understood it.
Plagiarism, simple copying, or verbatim answers often provide a useful insight into what – and how - people think.