If you are Tom Courtney, could you please tell me why you're passing off my blog posts as your own, and then cease and desist from passing off what I take the trouble to write as your own?
I haven't been on Technorati in many months. I found out that I have four people who have favorited my blog (thanks, Jeff Quinton, Harmony Lameche, Teambenya and to Foodette at Restaurant Review World out in the City of Angels).
Now I found my antepenultimate blog post, Exit 27A-B from my Beltway Snackin' series. I also noticed 470 blog reactions to me, accumulated over perhaps the last year or so.
Among them I found this. Click on it to read what it says:
This is what it says (all links have been deactivated and boldfaced):
It can be found here, on a website that is apparently about cell phones. I am not hotlinking it, so as not to give free publicity to somebody that may not merit it: http://www.cellamigo.com/blog/exits-27a-and-b-md-146-dulaney-valley-road-to-towson/Exits 27A and B: MD-146 (Dulaney Valley Road, to Towson)
Tom Courtney wrote an interesting post today on
Here’s a quick excerpt
I would’ve taken a photo just to remember all the varieties and ingredients, but I felt self-conscious even whipping out my cell phone, the guys behind the counter were that close. Each slice had delicious cheeses. …Read the rest of this great post here
Perhaps I am misunderstanding. I mean if anyone who clicks on this will get to me. But I'm puzzled as to who exactly "Tom Courtney" is, or if he even exists. I don't know if this is a bot or just a stream or someone trying to plagiarize off of me. Or it may just be streaming for me, but I never asked anyone to do that, seeing as how it's on a "blog" about cell phones, getting both me and them an extra link. I think it might be some kind of spam thing, since there is no way to contact anyone on that page - there is no contact info. And the only way I can leave comments is if I register. Of course, I'm afraid if I do that I'll get a ton and a half of spam in my inbox. But I will continue to figure out what the hell is going on.
So if this is legit, contact me and discuss this at your earliest convenience. And if it truly isn't on the up and up who or whatever you are, stop fucking plagiarizing what I write!!!
13 comments:
I like your blog posts when you cuss :)
Okay, I don't know who Tom Courtney is, and I don't think you should be either. Looking at that website, it's obviously just a spam blog: they steal posts from blogs to trick people using google to visit their site. Those types of blogs use trackbacks and direct linking to increase their site ranking and make moolah. It sucks, but aside for hoping that the average internet surfer can recognize the scam and avoid them in the future, there's really not much you can do except deleting their trackbacks and hoping any e-mail "cease and desist" you might send will find a receptive pair of eyes (doubtful).
The only thing I could suggest is finding out a way to make your blog immune to highlighting and copying. It would suck if a friend of yours wished to quote part of your blog on their own, but it would prevent someone from stealing your work wholesale (without retyping it word for word).
Thanks for the trackback, it's interesting you should write this, I recently had someone pull something similar to that on me, and I've been trying to understand why, the post they used linked back to me, and it wasn't one of my better posts....
MS: I'm very up for the idea about deleting their trackback links, but I'm not sure how to do that. Plus, since they seem to have avoided putting any way to contact them into their blog, I can't contact them at all >:( I wish there was some way to just screw the owners of that website. Very hard.
TB: YW!
Addendum to what I just said to MS: In the words of Liam "Kelly" Sullivan, I want to screw them "with something hard and sandpapery!"
The first thing I'd suggest is moving from Blogger to WordPress or Moveable Type, which allows you the ability to approve/deny not only comments but also trackbacks.
Does Wordpress cost anything? Or MT? I've investigated them a little in the past but figured it'd be too much work to change over. Now I have a better incentive.
Ugh, that sucks. I have a similar story. I recently found a few of my cupcake recipes on RecipeZaar and I haven't been mentioned or credited in any way, and my entire recipe has been completely copied and pasted - they didn't even have the sense to change around any of the words I use. The worst part is that they were showing up in a higher rank on a Google search so it looked like *I* copied their recipe! WTF?!? RecipeZaar sucks and they said that they wouldn't remove the recipes nor would they require the people to acknowledge the source because, according to them, sometimes people get recipes from friends and they don't know where their friend got it. Well, it's pretty clear in this case that they copied mine! Grr! Freaking plagiarists!
SO my point is this: I totally understand how angry you are!
It's just trackback spam. I get similar stuff all the time. They always have a portion of my post excerpted, linked back to me, credited to some random name. They're just in to to get a few links back for some advertising revenue.
My advice: just delete it.
Alex: Not sure how to delete it. Advice?
Roopa: Thanks for the sympathy!
John: It looks like this blog is just excerpting and linking to you. It looks to me like some kind of automated spam blog trying to catch google searches and get ad clicks, but I'm hardly an expert. Oh, and both WP and MT are available for free for personal bloggers (disclaimer: I work with MT full time and have contributed to its development).
Plus, you wouldn't be able to remove any link to your site on another site; it's not something you'd have access to, even if you did run MT or WP. :)
MS: Any kind of javascript tricks that will "disable" copying and pasting will most likely not have any effect on this like this, as they are most likely running in an automated fashion using feeds (or possibly via screen scraping, though that's *much* less likely). All those tricks will do is annoy actual people using actual browsers.
John: Not sure, since I don't use Blogspot. There's got to be a way to do it though.
my name is tom courtney. however i do not use blogspot, nor do i blog at all. i simply googled my name and found this. then again, tom courtney has been the name of my forefathers for 5 or 6 generations... still im sure that my last name isn't uncommon... and my first name is quite common...
i just thought i should comment ;-)
Thanks, Tom. Common as it is, I think some bot stole your name!
Y'know, I've never Googled my name. I'm not quite sure if I want to find out what I'd discover.
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