Well. This is weird.

Thursday, March 15, 2012


If you close your eyes and squint a little, don't you think this post bears an eery resemblance to this one?

Of course, it's hardly plagiarism on the scale of the controversy currently doing the rounds over in the slightly sinister domain of the mommybloggers. To be honest I'm more concerned that I found the post through a google search for "a safe mooring" (Don't look at me like that. You're telling me you've never googled your own blog?) and now I'm worried people might think I was personally responsible for this crime against the English language. For example, "I really, Present reckon that Oahu is the believed that number Points wedding presents." Um, what? That isn't even a sentence. Nor is "And thus Reasonable goal the kind of person who is going to breezily Expect Kansas city lasik surgery invoice". I mean... I just.. what are they on about?

In fairness, "Obtain drunken Experience Equipped with Mate Yvonne" does sound like something I'd say. And "minimising potential risk of a seventeen-toaster calamity" actually is something I said. (Seriously, of all the insane Frankensentences you put in that post, you had to get that one word-for-word?)

Hilarious as it is, I should probably get them to take it down. It's not really fair for some random scraper site to be profiting from my own ill-judged babbling. Fin's comment on the whole debâcle was, as ever, incisive:

"How come they can make money from it when you don't make any?"

GOOD POINT, FIN. Anybody want to offer me some money for some sentences that may or may not involve toasters and/or make sense? Anybody...?



{Image: Albumen print by Stephen Berkman (New York: Bliss, Zohar Studios, n.d.) From the collection of Ricky Jay.}

23 boats moored

  1. Just read the 'new' version of your post. It's so weird. But you've definitely made it now!

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  2. Weird and very shoddily done.

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  3. I dunno, "Understand It was not respectable trump something Your girl needed offer, I delved incorporated with the current wardrobe And yet came out triumphant, brandishing Those vase Like the leading man Revisiting Coming from war clutching a severed head" had a certain something about it. How about stealing it back and publishing it as a book of postmodern poetry?

    (But yeah, threaten 'em with fancy lawyer talk)

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    1. The embarrassing thing is, the bit about coming home from war clutching a severed head is also verbatim from my original post. Why did they have to keep only the mental bits???

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  4. Well it doesn't come up for me so maybe you put the frighteners on very effectively - did Smidgeon threaten to bite them?

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  5. Is this automated article spinning? I've come across this in my copywriting adventures.... Nice vase by the way!

    Px

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  6. We actually have someone who does that to one of the blogs I work on during my day job - every post is ripped off, word for word, by some suspicious website that even takes our (landscape) images and shoehorns them into their (portrait) image space. The reason we know about it is because they make off with every post links 'n' all, and since we always have internal links in our posts, we get a trackback alert. It seems to be automated, but we're all baffled as to the reason for it - the offending blog doesn't even come up in Google searches and no one seems to visit it. I'm sure there's some kind of techy explanation for the phenomenon though - I'll keep reading your comments in case anyone can enlighten us!

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    1. PS. Just read Penny's comment - I'm now off to Google 'automated article spinning'...!

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  7. The same thing happened to me last year with a post I wrote about being a bike widow - it popped up in a mixed up form on this random bike website that just had loads of articles on there that also seemed to be poached from other sites. I wrote the site administrator an email that told them to remove it immediately and they did. Like Helen, I have no idea why anyone would want to do this - even after Googling automated article spinning I still don't understand it. Can anyone techy provide an answer?

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  8. Yeah I find this whole article spinning thing really weird too, and quite depressing. To take the craft of writing and turn it into some SEO-targeted, computer-driven gobbledygook - have we no soul left??

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    1. I've seen that done to my posts in places... I just try and ignore it to be honest. It's just spamminess and google is pretty wise to gobbledygook I think so it does them no good either. Don't let it get to you xx

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  9. I'm a bit confused !? Nothing new there but really... What?

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  10. It's to drive traffic to websites via SEO I think? It's basically what I get paid to write original.material to do for agencies occasionally, but some nefarious places just rip off other sites rather than paying for original content. The "spinning" aspect is plugging the text into a thesaurus or something to make it slightly different, which is why it so often sounds mental.

    ....I think this is right but its an area I'm only just learning about myself!

    Px

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    1. Sorry if that made no sense either, touchscreen phone comments plus busy at work means sometimes I sound like I've been "spun"!!

      Px

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  11. Wow I am sorry this happened. That other post does not make any sense...
    Not sure if this helps at all, but sending you hugs, and positive energy and just, ignore it...

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    1. Aw thanks - don't worry, I'm not upset about it or anything. It's just a load of silly nonsense! It's good to be reminded occasionally that much of the internet is just a big heartless money-spinning machine - makes me even more grateful that my own little space on the internet is populated by all of you awesome folk!

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  12. Rosie (Kirsty's Mum)15 March 2012 at 16:09

    What the hell is that other blog about? What language is it meant to be, because it certainly isn't any English we know? Thought I had maybe started on the white wine a tad early when I read it! What a strange world this Blog World is...

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  13. what the actual f@ck? its clearly your post but with all the sentencestructure and wit removed and replaced with random words that make no sense? how bizarre!

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  14. I saw you tweet this yesterday and so was baffled that I didn't comment! Baffledness has now ebbed (yes, baffledness is a word, the little red squiggly line which appeared underneath it was just the internet's way of saying "good choice of word Fiona"), and pissed-off-ness has set in. It's very unfair for such a use of any of your material, whether they've stuck it through a blender with a thesaurus or not. And I'd pay for your toaster-babble.

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  15. To be honest, that reads like about half the emails I get every day, but the perpetrators were actually trying to communicate clearly. I'd rather get portions of your blogs but spun through babelfish for good old fashioned fun instead of chopped up for SEO purposes.

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  16. I read this yesterday and still don't know what to say. Very odd and silly, and kind of mean.

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