Thursday, January 27, 2005

Blogging e-shoes, part IV

As I was checking out Satin Pajama nominees, I came upon some post by Zoe (Belgium) regarding Blog Netiqeutte (sic). Apparently, Zoe was quite shocked to discover "someone's blog who comments here, and the entire blog appeared to be nothing else but posts from other people's blogs including all the comments"... And she was not alone. A great number of comments, attempting to define whether such an act is morally/ethically wrong, is plagiarism, is illegal or plain bad manners - or even if blogger.com could/would do something about it. Someone described the culprit as "pasteomaniac" (a la kleptomaniac), since she simply copied and pasted whole posts with their comments from other people's blogs.

The whole 'discussion' was rather inconclusive but the major point on the netiquette part would be where one draws the (jagged) line: is asking permission by email a required step? providing a link to the source? simply mentioning the original auteur? Or is this a really far-fetched case, perhaps even a "cunning plan" by some bored parablogger to simply stir spirits and watch hits-counters go amok?

Why do we all use hits-counters in the first place?

4 Comments:

Blogger zoe said...

careful - the blogger will be doing it to you too soon.

2:08 pm EET  
Blogger dystropoppygus said...

Ah, zoe, would this mean my blog is worth copying then? ;-) You see, I haven't decided if I'd care at all. But, as someone commented (in your thread), you can't argue with anyone sporting a severely handicapped mind, can you?

4:41 pm EET  
Blogger soap said...

Hmm. Parablogging or metablogging? Of course it’s no great revelation to point out that we’re all word bandits by our very nature, stealing some factoids here and some catchy turns of phrase there. Homo loquens thrives upon the discursive. A distinction has to be made, however, between the benign recycling of everyday communication, the passing on of specific information with proper attribution, and outright plagiarism. The latter just isn’t cool, no matter how you look at it.

10:08 am EET  
Blogger zoe said...

ahhh, but to 'ask' if you can reproduce someone else's work is quite different. that was my initial point.

tant pis for those who don't care. i was simply asking about 'blog nétiquette'. nothing more.

9:01 pm EET  

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