When Thomas MacEntee wrote about his Geneabloggers content being "splogged" towards the end of March, I read the post, but I didn't think it had any real relevance to me. That is until I received a "Google alert" that showed my content on another blog. It was not attributed to me, just simply cut and paste. Luckily, I had retained some of the information from Thomas' post. I headed to Geneabloggers to check out Thomas' post on
20 March 2012 and the Geneabloggers'
Blog Copyright and Content Theft page for tips on how to deal with the situation. Thomas MacEntee has graciously offered to let us "borrow" the wording from his own Cease and Desist letters. I could not find any way to contact the blog owner via email, so instead I posted a comment on their blog, which is hosted by TypePad. I'm so grateful to Thomas for providing this guidance and helping our blogging community maintain control over our own content.
I'm also glad that I set up Google alerts for my blog. For more information on how to do this yourself visit the Google Alerts
homepage. You can set up "alerts" for whatever topic you choose, be it your blog's name, a family name you are researching, or even the titles to your blog posts. When you set up an alert, Google temporarily scans the Internet for new results on topics you choose. You will then receive an email with a list of the results.
I have set alerts for my blog's title and a few surnames, but now I'm thinking I'll also set up alerts for some of my blog posts. I work too hard on writing my blog for it just to be stolen.
4 comments:
Glad you were able to do something about that - stealing other people's content is a surefire way to make sure people stop sharing, and sharing is too important to our work. I'm more than happy for people to take what I write and pass it on, but it's not that difficult to add an extra two or three words attributing the work and linking back to the original post. Thanks for the Google alerts tip - hope this doesn't happen to you again!
Thanks about the tip about Google alert!
I am curious about your Google alerts. Was it the surnames or your blog titles that lead to finding someone stealing your content? I ask because I only use Google alerts for a couple of surnames right now. I am wondering if I need to expand my alerts list.
@Sierra- I have alerts set up for some surnames, but also the title of my blog "leaves for trees." I also just started adding alerts for the titles of some of my posts. I haven't yet seen if that will pay off or not.
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