Oops! I was supposed to be hosting the It’s A Girl : Women Writers on Raising Daughters book tour here today, but I forgot my copy of the book at home, and it has all my little notes and ideas and observations scrawled on an envelope tucked under the front cover. Bad Dani, BAD! So drop by later this evening, where I will post the entire review, complete with references.
Um, so, in the absence of that… (*sound of crickets*)
Okay, so these aren’t fully formed posts, but I have a bunch of notes on blogs and writing and books and stuff that I was going to tell you about, and I’m just going to dump them on you and let you make something out of them, cuz apparently I’m not thinking terribly well early on a Monday morning.
For example, here’s an article from Business Week about “blooks” – books from bloggers, and more specifically, books from blogs. The first half of the article talks about getting an actual publishing deal, and creating a book from a blog, which while I think is a relatively cool idea, I don’t think would ever happen in this dilettante writer’s lifetime. The second half of the article talks about making your own archival copy of blog into a book, which I would love to do some day. I’m surprised they don’t mention services like Blogbinders. Wouldn’t that be cool, to have a coffee-table version of blog? Some day I will do this, because my original way-back-when idea for this blog was to document the moments and minutia that have made up our early years with the boys, and having a paper copy of it sitting on the shelf somehow seems more tactile-y satisfying than booting up the computer to reminisce.
But, back to today – Micro Persuasion had a link this morning to an interesting article on blog plagarism. The article talks about not only having entire posts appropriated (Getupgrrl from the now defunct Chez Miscarriage, perhaps one of my favourite blog writers ever, didn’t keep an archive because of ongoing problems with plagarism), but even stealing Flickr photos and claiming credit for them.
One of the things the article mentions to mitigate the risk of plagarism is to only post snippets on their RSS feeds, instead of full posts. It never occured to me that this is why some people don’t let you read the whole post on an aggregator. Now I’m wondering if I should bother truncating my own feeds, as right now I have the full feed enabled.
This is a kind of weird discussion to have, because part of me thinks I’m a little full of myself to think that I write well enough to have anybody bother to plagarise me, but I will admit that I’ve occasionally run google searches on some lines from my favourite posts to see if they are getting lifted. So far, so good. I think I am relieved.
Any thoughts on all this? Would you buy a book based on your favourite blog, or is that a matter of not buying the cow when you can get the milk for free? If you loved a blogger’s style, would that be enough to make you buy their book? And what about blog plagarism? Have you seen it? If it happened, what would you do?
I have faith in you, clever commenters! You have a wonderful way of taking a dogpile of disorganized information and making an interesting discussion out of it – get to it!
I haven’t seen plagiarism yet. I did run into a couple of people reposting a knitting pattern of mine. I had given it a caveat of free distribution, but not mentioned reposting, so I decided to take it out of it’s pdf format and put it directly in a post on my blogspot blog, informing the reposters that the “link had changed”.
I have also seen a lot of bandwidth theft: people embedding images into their posts that are taken directly from their source. The problem is that when the reader opens the page, causing the images to open, the images are being run off the original server, thereby costing the owner of the images money which the theft is not paying. I’ve given anonymous netiquette lectures when I’ve seen this happen.
I’ve heard of whole posts being appropriated and blog personalites/styles, too. That can be really creepy. It’s like a combo of identity theft and stalking. Very SWF.
If I saw it happen, I think I’d definitely rat the thief out. As a content provider myself, I wouldn’t want that happening to me. You get a sick, scared feeling when that kind of thing happens.
And, blog books. I think that the book would have to be new material. I’ve bought all of Yarn Harlot’s books (Stephanie Pearl McPhee) because I like her writing. Her blog posts and hardcopy essays are often similar, but not the same. I’d be interested in reading a print version of Dooce, but not if I’d already read it on dooce.com. KWIM?
Now, binding a vanity copy of my own pregnancy blog for my son and posterity would be cool. (and I should look into that before that blog becomes lost in the ether – it was a handmade blog, as opposed to created on blogging software and I don’t think the hosting will stay forever)
When I plagarised (from you), I first asked permission (from you) and was them most kindly given permission to do so (from you).
Does that help???
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Not at all. I know.
I had one entire posts stolen and re-submitted to a college instructor once…he caught the mishap and found me…that’s it, nothing more exciting
You have raised very good questions and ones I hadn’t even thought of. Technorati wasn’t able to properly track posts unless the whole RSS feed was made available. I think. I’m too new to know what I’m doing yet so I do appreciate all you are covering.
Thanks.
Cheers.
I don’t think I would buy a book from a blog I read. Not if it was the blog in book form. for one thing: read it already. For another: good blog writing does not translate well into print. Good print writing does not come across well on blogs. They’re different mediums. Kind of like reading a play. IMO
I haven’t heard of blog plagiarism, but I did hear of a woman who “borrowed” a little boy she was babysitting and passed him off as her daughter–and even pretended to breastfeed him. Yuck.