Wordpress boss Matt Mullenweg believes spam is one of the blogosphere’s biggest threats but another increasingly troubling issue is plagiarism. We’re not talking about people taking the ideas of other bloggers but outright theft of entire posts or passages. A recent example is The Client Side, which had its posts ripped off without attribution or even a hat tip by Scott Kress, an experienced blogger who should know better. Over the weekend, several b5 bloggers noticed a blog called All Women Talk is using other people’s content without permission.

Within the media, plagiarists are treated like vermin and quickly ostracized. In the blogopshere, it seems many people are still trying to get their heads around plagiarism. On one hand, it can be somewhat flattering to have your content “borrowed” by someone else because it suggests what you’re writing is interesting. Many blogs using your content will try to get around it by linking back to your blog or giving you credit.

After awhile, you begin to realize you’re doing all the work while someone else is reaping the benefits (readership, traffic, advertising revenue) by scraping your content. Why should someone ever visit your blog if they can read it somewhere else? You soon realize the linkbacks are insincere tokens of thanks. Rather than giving you some props/credit, they’re a cheap and inadequate way of asking for permission.

So what can you do if another blogger is ripping off your work? You can start with a friendly comment or e-mail, suggesting that while you’re flattered by the attention, it would be better if they put together their own thoughts on a particular topic while citing the blog where they got the idea. If that doesn’t work, a harsher e-mail or a post on your blog outing the plagiarist may be the next move. In extreme cases, you can use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, (DMCA) to compel people to take down seen to be infringing on copyrighted content.

For more information on plagiarism, check out Plagiarism Today, a blog that looks at plagiarism, content theft and copyright issues.

Technorati Tags: Plagiarism

Computer hackers, viruses and phishing scams attack other people, right? It doesn’t affect the tech savvy, right? Well, I discovered the hard way that anyone is vulnerable to bad people online. It started about a week ago when someone tried to move a large amount of money out of my bank account. Fortunately, our tenant had bounced a rent check so there was actually no money in the account to be transferred out.

A few days later, the bank was able to tell me that the transfer request was made by Paypal, which was strange because I hadn’t made a major transaction involving Paypal. So, I called Paypal to see what was up. To make a long story short, some people in England and Indonesia had somehow broken into my Paypal account, changed the e-mail information and the password, and taken the money out, which prompted Paypal to demand additional funds from my bank account.

The story has a relatively happy ending (at least for me). After an hour on the phone with a terrific customer service person from Paypal (I wish I had taken down her name so I could have pass along my compliments to her boss), everything was sorted out and my Paypal account will be restored.

Aside from making me feel extremely vulnerable and giving my Luddite-like wife yet another reason to scorn the Internet, this incident has really caused me to reconsider how much information I provide online, where it’s stored, who has it and what I can do to be smarter. Given I’ve been actively online for 10 years, it may be late in the game for me to “clean the slate” entirely, but I’m definitely going to be more cautious about who gets my information in the future.

Note: Speaking of viruses, there’s an interesting post from the person who wrote the first computer virus 25 years ago, while Web Worker Daily has a post looking at people should be careful about giving personal information to Web 2.0 services. Mathew Ingram writes about Microsoft looking to get into the micro-payments business so it could compete against Paypal and Google Checkout.

Technorati Tags: Mark Evans, Paypal