A number of unrelated news items made me come up with this unusual post. Blogger always blog about how, what etc to do with blogs. I haven’t seen any what not to do articles. On a unrelated not I wanted to write about each of the news items separately but I thought I would group them up into a single post.
Steal Other People’s Content.
We seen a lot of bloggers complain about sploggers, but what happens when you copy paste someone’s post your not only stealing someone else hard work but also losing your credibility.
Scott Carney is a journalist who writes for Wired.com I saw him when I went for BlogCamp Chennai 06. He writes excellent Offbeat news. I been reading his blog for more than a year. Today I read on his blog on how abcnews stole his story and pictures. The story was about a group of calligraphers in Chennai who are writing the last handwritten newspaper in the world. He took the trouble to research met and talk to the people involved. This is what he has to say. If you have a account on Digg Please Digg his Story here which was submitted by my friend Bentley.
Now for those of you not steeped in media politics, freelance writers like myself make our living by selling stories to media outlets and we get paid in return for our work. We are usually allowed to resell a story after a certain amount of time to make a little more money for our labor. Still, most freelance writers barely scrape together a living, but do it out of love for the job. So when I found out that one of the largest media conglomerates in the world had decided to publish my writing without seeking my permission first (or offering to buy it) I sent a note out to them to see what was going on.
Be Rude To Your Readers / be a Comment Police.
Always be polite and to the point when dealing with your readers. Don’t tell your reader to shut up like Gizmodo did recently (Google for “gizmodo readers shut up” I won’t be linking to them in the future). Not only are you being rude but you are pissing off your readers. I was one of the few people who were annoyed with the influx of iPhone news. The only reason they can afford to do that is because they are popular and losing a few readers doesn’t impact them in a big way. (Maybe thats one reason why Engadget is way more popular than gizmodo). On another note, recently I posted on a blog telling the author that I was unable to access his site from home, I posted it as a comment on a unrelated post, I got back a really rude reply telling me to keep the comments on topic. I was a bit baffled by this, I won’t be visiting or commenting on that blog again.
Steal other people’s Ideas without giving credit.
Ladies and Gentlemen I present you with the Worlds Largest legal Splog http://news.softpedia.com/. Every news from under the sun is posted here without a mention of who,where and what their sources are. Why do I say its legal, well I think they rewrite their content hence they can get away with it since they don’t copy paste content. How about Adobe stealing Colourlovers Ideas, it doesn’t always have to be content.
Post Invalid, Uncorrected, and Un-Researched Facts/News
Bloggers like to echo what other bloggers say. In fact I recently noticed quite a few popular tech blog out there seem to be re-posting news that’s already out there, all they do is rewrite the content and give a link back. While I am not against this, but do such people take the trouble to research and verify the facts. In fact a number of so called A-list Blogs are guilty of this example TechCrunch, GigaOM, Scoble (Lately I been getting a bit annoyed with his blog posts, it look more like a 10 year old kids blog) etc. here’s what Mike Arrington said a while back.
Is it in the best interests of blogs to say outrageous things to drive traffic? Mike Arrington: “You’re wrong” Gives analogy that he could get away with saying something wrong once (or maybe twice). The trade off of integrity is something he makes every day.
P.S I decided to contribute this post as part of the group writing project at dailyblogtips.
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Good post. The funny part is that all these things you list are common practices for many bloggers.
(That comment preview you have is awsome!)