About.com and Blog Plagiarism

Carl Vancil, an About.com PC Support guide, has copied a story on Windows Validation from this website word by word without giving any credit. They haven’t replied to any of my emails as well.

Original Story on Digital Inspiration
Copied Content on About.com

Never expected this kind of a thing from a reputed website like About.com ? I don’t mind people linking to my blog or copying text from here but a link would be nice.

Michelle Meyers is pointing to a good comment on a Slashdot story on Blog Plagiarism

For a blogger to get copied without recognition, I can understand the anger. A newspaper stole their information! So what. The newspaper is dead. All a blogger has to do is mention who is quoted them (verbatim in some cases) and use it to build their following.

Mike Stall has a golden rule for bloggers and other online media:

If you copy somebody else’s blog entry verbatim, credit the original author and link back to the original post.

Guido Fawkes even conducted a Press Plagiarist of the Year contest. Stories that qualified for the award had to “be pinched from an original blog source, either verbatim or in essence, and no credit/payment given to the original source.”

Adobe COO on Macromedia & Outsourcing

On the eve of Adobe-Macromedia merger, Forbes is carrying an interview with Shantanu Narayen, COO, Adobe Systems. Shantanu share his views on the future of Adobe Macromedia products after the merger. He also speaks about the mobile revolution in India and China and how Adobe sees that as a big opportunity for Adobe [Macromedia] products like Flash lite.

On Adobe-Macromedia Merger:
For the creative designer/developer customer, we want to offer the best of Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop. For example, Web site designers can work with Photoshop and then switch over to Dreamweaver to create the site. We can make this all work seamlessly.

For the knowledge worker, we want Acrobat to be one of those essential desktop applications - just like e-mail. Macromedia Breeze allows for asynchronous collaboration, which means that workers don’t have to be in the same place at the same time. That can facilitate much faster productivity. For the enterprise customer, we are focusing on life cycle.

On plans to move into document storage
Both content management and storage are a great opportunity, but we don’t view it as an opportunity for Adobe.

On Outsourcing work to India Offices
It enables us to do 24-hour software development around the world. But also when I talk about alternate devices - our telecom structure here in the U.S. is significantly behind. Look at Korea, China, India and Eastern Europe - that’s where a lot of the mobile revolution is happening. It’s the people there who are going to figure out what new solutions and services are required.

Read full interview with Shantanu Narayen, COO, Adobe Systems

What you Google for defines you

Police and prosecutors now are routinely making a supsect’s web search terms a witness for the prosecution.

Petrick used Google to search the Internet for references to “body decomposition,” “rigor mortis,” “neck” and “break” in the days before and after he murdered his wife, Janine Sutphen, then dumped her body in a lake. Petrick also searched for and downloaded a topical map of a lake bed in the days before he dumped the woman’s remains in the same body of water.

Petrick’s Google activity was introduced at trial to convince the jury of the timeline for Petrick’s murderous activity. The Petrick case goes beyond serving as a textbook example of how police and prosecutors incorporate someone’s Internet habits into their investigations and prosecutions.

Read full story - Search Terms Are a Witness for the Prosecution

Meet some blogging Grandpas

A babe of the 50’s, a child of the 60’s, a teen of the 70’s, and a woman of the ages. That’s the profile of an old woman who is regularly blogging. The Older Bloggers List writes about some interesting elderly bloggers. Here are some of them (Most elderly bloggers need a web design consultant):


My Mom’s Blog “Thoroughly Modern Millie” Garfield, age 80, writes about everything from her travels to the Southwest to her recipe for baked apple crisp. She also includes humorous video clips, such as her recent discourse on packages that are too difficult for older fingers to open.

mymomsblog.blogspot.com/


Clarence Bowles’s Can You Hear Me Now? is the 65-year-old Kentucky man’s soapbox for giving his views and observations on life, ranging from movies to fishing.

canyouhearmenow.typepad.com/index/


Texas Trifles is authored by Liz “Cowtown Pattie” May, who writes about her teenage experiments with Miracle Whip as a hair treatment, turkey buzzards, killer bees and other oft-amusing aspects of living in the Lone Star State.

texastrifles.blogspot.com/


Full Fathom Five, written by English teacher and Maine resident Mary Lee Fowler, gives a snapshot of life in a “rural community of artists, craftsmen, farmers and gardeners, all united by our love of nature.” Recent entries dealt with the experience of teaching English to Chinese immigrants.

mlcoe.typepad.com/full_fathom_five/

Shoemonkey targets Darren Rowse over Chitika

ShoeMoney has slammed problogger Darren Rowse for “excessively” promoting Chitika eMiniMalls in his weblog. ShoeMonkey writes:

At first I thought it was weird how much problogger.net promoted Chitika. Then I found it even more weird when I got a email from Chitika telling me to visit problogger for tips on better conversions… Maybe its just ironic but perhaps maybe this “expert” had “incentives” to promote Chitika. I am just wondering to myself why problogger would try so hard to promote a company that really has no reason to be so heavily promoted.

Darren has tried to defend himself by saying:

I do report both the good and bad about Chitika. I’m more positive about them than negative because they perform so well for me on my blogs. Most of my posts about them are ‘how to’ posts - ie how to work with a system that many people complain about but a system that many don’t know how to use effectively.

Randy Charles Morin adds:

When someone is paying you thousands of dollars per month, as Darren claims he’s receiving from Chitika, then you act nice to those people. Right? That’s common sense.

Agree with Randy. Problogger in bed with Chitika early maybe not so smart

Times Online Desktop Search with Toolbar

Times Online, UK have released Smart Search, a desktop search tool based on the Blinx search tool with an added channel featuring bespoke Times Online headlines. The Times Online Desktop Search constantly searches Times Online to find the most relevant news and articles.

Users can search multimedia file formats including Podcasts, Mp3, MPEGs and image files as well as Adobe files, Microsoft Office documents and attachments both online and locally. The Smart Folders technology automatically update add content based on the a range of popular topics including today’s headlines, world news and sports coverage.

Blinkx has earlier released Blinkx 3.5 desktop search that provided one click access to Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers. Blinkx is powered by Autonomy that employs advanced speech recognition and video analysis to automatically catalogue and index every spoken word in video footages.

Download Times Online Desktop Search
View Blinkx Press Release

Times Online is the online edition of The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers in the UK and more popular than websites of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The Observer

Adobe Gets Macromedia - Microsoft Look Out!

Adobe will finally acquire Macromedia on Dec 3, 2005. The purchase gives Adobe, creator of the Acrobat program for creating PDF documents, a range of Web-design programs and Macromedia’s Flash, software for playing videos that’s used in 98 percent of the world’s computers.

The closing of the transaction, which has been ratified by shareholders of both companies, had remained subject to regulatory approval in a few European jurisdictions. The U.S. Department of Justice has already cleared the proposed deal.

Solution providers have said the Macrodobe combination Adobe’s ubiquitous PDF file format and Acrobat reader and strong PhotoShop franchise along with Macromedia’s robust Dreamweaver toolset for web development and Flash player for multimedia websites, are a potent counterweight even to Microsoft’s software dominance. Both PDF and Flash are seen as even more pervasive on PCs, desktops, and devices than Microsoft Windows or Internet Explorer, for example. [via | via]