phil ringnalda

Something only vaguely related caught my attention while reading about Dorothea going public (domain, that is). She says that

As for Shelley’s fear of someone posing as her via her writing—look, I am me and you are not. Shell is Shell and we are not. No poseur can take that away. A weblog is particularly difficult to use to maintain such a pose, I should think; any attempt to mirror is just that, and Google can ferret out the original in femtoseconds.

Which reminded me of one of several blogging tempests I’ve run across lately: apparently someone has been using ph8.blogspot.com to do exactly that, posting what BoldOpinion.com says was about 80% of his content from them, and most of the rest is also copied from elsewhere. Change a few names, change the date when you don’t get around to posting It’s October 4th, Better Get Some Egg Nog until November 27th, and you’ve got yourself a blog. Google will out you, though not in femtoseconds since first go around Google will “have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed,” and the 1 may or may not be the original.

However, first someone has to actually search for a distinctive phrase that you’ve used. Apparently, that didn’t happen for eleven months, since ph8’s been running (and copying) since last March, in what was apparently a vastly longer than I would ever keep it up joke, given that the final entry on the first day of the blog led to a (now moved) Scientific American article on how technology makes plagiarism harder to get away with. Erm. I’m a big fan of jokes that only I get, but for eleven months? Never mind the ethics, that’s just too damn much work for too little humor.