The famous tech blog, Engadget, is under fire tonight for allegedly plagiarizing stories. I first heard of this story via RSS from the Blog Herald (the entry is now removed for unknown reasonshere) and subsequently from ProBlogger. The story is surfacing over at Digg which could mean legitimacy or a wildfire case of mistaken understanding. I don’t know and I’m not willing to pass judgement because I really don’t know both sides of the story.
However, if this is true, this is a major black eye for blogging. Engadget is the largest blog in terms of daily pageviews and is a highly respected source of gadget and consumer electronics news and reviews. Darren makes a good point, and one that every blogger who likes to quote sources on the internet, that:
Whether Engadget are at fault or not I’m not in a position to say - but the story is an important one for bloggers to consider when they are bouncing off what others are writing.
I know that this can be a real challenge for many popular blogs which get pitched ideas all day. Problems often arise when a story appears in multiple places at once, all using the same pictures and information. I would imagine that Engadget get many emails notifying them of each story - each one is after one thing, simply to get the link as the source which guarantees traffic and Google Juice. This would be complicated by the blog being a multi-author blog.
Stumble it!
About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He is Business Development Manager for Lijit and he worked as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.
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Regardless, I take full responsibility for the mistake and that this will not happen again. We do a 1000 posts a month and occassionally we do screw up.
To be clear, we did NOT plagiarize, at worst we failed to properly credit and infringed on DAPreview's image copyright.
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with friends like these...
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You say "not throwing up PR bullshit" - the comment that Peter has placed here is pure PR - it's the exact same comment (word for word) at all the relevant blogs he's placed it on.
I don't really think the issue is about plagiarizing stories - it's more the fact that they cropped an image and removed a watermark. It's pretty clear cut.
I guess all blogs take images here and there but the issue here is that this particular image had a watermark and that watermark was a link. A simple email would have sorted it out as 99% of publishers who'd take that image that had such a watermark would naturally assume it belonged to whomever watermarked it.
I'm hoping it's more laziness on their part rather than anything underhand.
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