Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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December 17, 2006

Bloggy Question 34: Time Is Money, but Content Is Free for the Paraphrasing!

ME Liz Strauss wrote this at 6:11 pm

Creative Problem Solving

For those who come looking for a short, thoughtful read, a blogging life discussion, or a way to gradually ease back into the week. I offer this bloggy life hypothetical question. . . .


Your friend has recently broken through the barrier and gotten her first client. You’re delighted for her. She’s just delighted. Things seems to be going smoothly with everything. Her client likes her work. Her blog is getting traffic. You like to see people succeed.

You were feeling happy for her too. Until yesterday.

Yesterday you were listening to a podcast she used to talk about regularly. In the middle of it you started thinking, “Gee, this sound familiar. I must have listened to this before.” But you know you haven’t, because you haven’t listened to a podcast in over two months and this one is 3 weeks old.

You start to remember something. A bad feeling comes with it. Still it bothers you enough that you have to check it. You pull up your friend’s blog to find the same content is there in print. It’s paraphrased sure enough, but there’s no denying that the ideas are in the same order.

You think back to how you friend used to talk about that podcast all of the time and now doesn’t. You think about how she used to complain about having no time between meeting client deadlines and keeping up with her blog to get new clients. You think that the two might be related.

How do you respond?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Bloggy Question 33: You’ve Changed, Man — DON’T Look at Yourself
Bloggy Question 32: Blogger Alert! Where Is She? What Should You Do?
Bloggy Question 31: Do You Send Away the Idea of a Lifetime?
Bloggy Life Question 30 — How Does He Get the Book to Readers?
Bloggy Life Question 29 — Will You Sell the URL to the Porn King?





Filed under Bloggy Questions, Successful Blog | 19 Comments »




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19 Comments to “Bloggy Question 34: Time Is Money, but Content Is Free for the Paraphrasing!”

  1. December 17th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
    HART (1-800-HART) said

    No offense .. but first instincts are to respond with something like .. “Liz .. you have too much time on your hands!

    Is it just me? I don’t see anybody else storming down the door to comment :p

  2. December 17th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
    ME Strauss said

    Hi HART,
    Actually HART, this situation happened last summer . . . I know it did. :)

    But as to the question of time. I suppose, everyone is like about now . . . with hardly any time at all because of holidays.

    Thanks, though, for letting me know. :)

    PS. You remind me of my brother. :)

  3. December 17th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
    HART (1-800-HART) said

    I hope that’s a good thing! (that I remind you of your brother) :)

    Hypothetically .. how would YOU respond to this bloggy question, if it happened last summer? Then, instead of trying to come up with witty answers .. we could come up with witty critiques :roll:

  4. December 17th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
    ME Strauss said

    Yeah! I’m not about to go critquing by gene pool!!

    In just this past week I told someone who did something similar that he did something seriously wrong that a person doesn’t paraphrase Wikipedia or another person’s writing or content. We learned that in 5th grade and no one has changed that rule yet.

  5. December 18th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
    Grigor said

    Sometimes it is hard to write a post or an article which is original in all of it’s parts. Even if we don’t want that, something might easily come out from our subconsciousness, from something we have read or heard. However, copying other’s work, without giving a proper credit is completely wrong. In this case I would be disappointed but I would not react. At least, not for the first time…

  6. December 18th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
    ME Strauss said

    Hi Grigor,
    It is hard to remember someitmes where we we got the information that’s ben sitiing on our hard drive for a while now — that’s why it’s always god to take the citation when we takt the ideas or quoation so that the tow never suffer a separation. Giving proper credit, as you say is important and without it is completly wrong. You would hope that after learning at such early age we would all know and unconsciously put that into practice, something about being online seems to make some folks thinkg that the rule is now gone.

  7. December 18th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
    Chris Cree said

    I guess the key to this one is the word “friend”. If I saw my friend doing this I’d call them on it. I’d rather it was me trying to gently help them get back on track in private, than some stranger calling them out later in public and trashing their reputation.

    If I didn’t already have that relationship with the person where I could speak up, I’d probably just hang back and take a wait-and-see approach.

  8. December 18th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
    ME Strauss said

    Yeah, Chris, I’d be sure to tell a friend to back off. I wouldn’t want a friend to jeopardize his or her good standing in this way.

  9. December 20th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
    whoa said

    Hi.
    This is a really interesting question. My website is in spanish, and i often report what i see on other sites, providing links to the original news source, but in my posts not only i try to investigate more than one source but also try to write with my own style (again, since my site is in spanish, translation is in order).
    So my take would be if you find something from someone else, quote, link or give credit, but also change so it reflects your own opinions about the subject, even if you share some of the vision written in the post you read, you should be able to write something original about it, or not do it at all.
    I think that a good example is the Make: blog, they often use the “Link, Via, Thanks to” method and you can pick from there a few pointers about how to write something while providing your own point of view.
    Think of it as finding this awesome wallpaper and putting it on your blog, you could say it’s yours and that you made it but it’s better to provide a link to the original source.

  10. December 20th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
    whoa said

    sorry but i forgot to pick the notify me check, this one is here to do so.

  11. December 20th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
    ME Strauss said

    Hi whoa,
    but also change so it reflects your own opinions about the subject, even if you share some of the vision written in the post you read, you should be able to write something original about it, or not do it at all.

    That’s the key, isn’t it? I’ve seen the same wrong behavior in meetings — where I’ve heard someone parrot ideas that weren’t his (I’m thinking of a specific person) own.

    If writer reads or hears something interesting, takes it in and actually ponders and internalizes the thoughts, i.e . makes them his or her own, then the ideas change they take on new shades of meaning. The ideas shift slightly in value and context. That’s when the source and the writer unite in bringing the idea a little bit forward. The writer still owes the source a link, but for sure then plagiarism is out of the question.

    Thank you, whoa for helping to clarify the thoughts around this situation. :)

  12. December 20th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
    Chris Cree said

    What about someone paraphrasing a translation on the fly? If they were kind enough to give a link back with credit I think I’d be all for it.

    Of course if it were in another language I probably wouldn’t be able to tell if it was my stuff or not anyway! :lol:

  13. December 20th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
    ME Strauss said

    Chris,
    You have a point there. If someone just hits the Google translator for some obscure language and copies what happens, that’s plagiarism, but who would know?

  14. December 20th, 2006 at 8:04 pm
    whoa said

    Your audience will. The bigger the audience (and we are talking about the internet) the more people who speak 2 or more languages will point out if you have plagiarized your news from somewhere else or if your news got plagiarized elsewhere.
    I think that deviantart has had it’s share of trouble on that front too when they decided to open their news publication to it’s members. They had to clarify “What’s news” so people would not resource to “copy/paste” news from other sites.
    This is like presenting wikipedia textual content as yours in a publication or a report at school/university, somebody is bound to find out about it sooner or later.

  15. December 20th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
    ME Strauss said

    Hi whoa!
    In a weird way, I keep coming back to 5th grade. We learned we weren’t supposed to do this when we were 10 years old. We knew better when we were even younger than that. Everyone has a sense fairness and knows what work is and isn’t.

    People should do their own and leave other people’s work alone.

  16. December 20th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
    whoa said

    Those were simpler days. In theory the same rules still apply, it is us who have changed. (Well not me, I’m still childish lol).

  17. December 20th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
    ME Strauss said

    We’ve got a chance, whoa, as long as some of us still remember what the rules are. :)

  18. December 25th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
    Liz Strauss at Successful Blog - Bloggy Question 35: A Bloggy Buddy said

    [...] Related articles Bloggy Question 34: Time Is Money, but Content Is Free for the Paraphrasing! Bloggy Question 33: You’ve Changed, Man — DON’T Look at Yourself Bloggy Question 32: Blogger Alert! Where Is She? What Should You Do? Bloggy Question 31: Do You Send Away the Idea of a Lifetime? Bloggy Life Question 30 — How Does He Get the Book to Readers? [...]

  19. February 11th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
    Liz Strauss at Successful Blog - Bloggy Question 36: When She Started Serendading said

    [...] Related articles Bloggy Question 34: Time Is Money, but Content Is Free for the Paraphrasing! Bloggy Question 33: You’ve Changed, Man — DON’T Look at Yourself Bloggy Question 32: Blogger Alert! Where Is She? What Should You Do? Bloggy Question 31: Do You Send Away the Idea of a Lifetime? Bloggy Life Question 30 — How Does He Get the Book to Readers? [...]

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