Bloggers Addicted to the Traffic Rush Turn to Blog-Lifting

An Example of ‘Blog-Lifting’

When an article originally produced by the Mercury News was syndicated, with full credits and copyright intact, at the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel as the article ‘Some bloggers worry about effect on life offline‘, this represented nothing more than the usual flow of stories between affiliated newspapers. Papers and other news outlets routinely share such stories.

But when the very same story later turned up, stripped of credits, copyright, and missing half the story — and without any additional original content — in a blog published by a well known psychology pundit briefly quoted in the article, the irony was hard to miss. The original article comments on the addictive nature of blogging and the anxiety felt by many bloggers as they struggle to keep posting new material and keep drawing traffic to their sites: “What starts out as a hobby for some can end up permeating their lives and minds”. The psychology pundit had been quoted in the article commenting about blogs being “a healthy means of self-expression and validation” but noting the risk of spending “enormous amounts of time blogging rather than living”. And here was the same individual ‘blog-lifting’*: recycling someone else’s work to fill blog space, but without providing the normal courtesy of fully attributing the source and leaving copyright information intact. Although I’m only an occasional visitor to the particular blog mentioned above, a casual glance at the archives shows that almost all of the content of recent posts is lifted directly from others’ work. The pattern is so pervasive that it is actually only this blogger’s rare original content that is highlighted with any type of visual cue: rather than highlighting others’ work as a quotation and presenting the blogger’s work in a normal typeface, it is the copied work which is presented in a normal typeface, and the blogger’s comments which are set off in italics! (To be fair, each example of blog-lifting on the particular blog I’ve mentioned does carry a link to the original story — but because this link simply duplicates the title of the post and appears right below the main post title, I wonder how many people even register it is there, let alone actually click on that link?)

Is There a Problem With Blog-Lifting?

So what’s the problem — apart from the probable displeasure of those who have actually done some work to provide the material being published without attribution on someone else’s blog? Problems are in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, and so probably for many people there is no problem! What I personally find disheartening about this trend, though, is that many users do not realize they are being duped, and many bloggers take no steps to dispel the misleading nature of this type of unoriginal blog-lifting. A quick Technorati search shows that many other bloggers and other non-blog sites link to these types of blogs believing that they are linking to the actual source of the information being ‘reported’. Likewise, comments left by visitors expressing sympathy for the blogger, or otherwise suggesting that they are taking the blogger seriously as the source of a post, may go unanswered, the comment only further acting to reinforce the impression that the blog-lifting is an original post.

The specific example of unoriginal blog-lifting described above is by no means isolated: an increasing number of bloggers are turning to recycling others’ stories in an attempt to keep their blog entries coming. The line is blurring between the common and perfectly legitimate practice of commenting on news stories and others’ blog posts, and simply lifting them verbatim.

As that line blurs further — and as even some blogging veterans begin adopting the practice — it seems to me that the trust relationship between bloggers and their readers will be eroded. It also increases the odds that some day you will see your own words regurgitated in someone else’s blog as if they weren’t yours at all.

Have you been blog-lifted yet?

*The closely related term ‘blog-stuffing’ refers to commenting repeatedly on a blog post, usually with some unscrupulous intention, such as making it appear that many visitors agree with a particular post. Some of the ramifications of this type of blog-stuffing are explored by David Strom of InternetWeek.

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