I Think It's My First Time

but I don't know.  I only know no date rape drug was involved. 

Blog brother Borepatch commented on one of my older posts to point out that it had been nabbed by a blog scraper.  I was only dimly aware of the term and had never looked into it.  I don't want to post any links to the blogger (apparently in Turkey, judging by some of the language on the page) but they seem to be a pretty epic failure at it.  If the purpose of scraping a blog is to get eyes to look at your page for the ads while not having to do any actual work, they're pretty bad.  Although they have about 3 search engine pages full of different blogs - I assume all stolen content - I didn't see a single ad.  On the one blog I visited, they had a half dozen of my fairly recent posts stolen, images and all.  No ads. 

I don't know this is the first time my material has been stolen, and wouldn't have known without the tip, but it feels kind of creepy.  Kind of violated; mind-raped in a way.  I understand there is some software (Copyscape for example) that might help us know it's going on, but I don't really know how good that software is, or if there's really any way to prevent it.  Some of the "Tips for Bloggers" pages seem to say, "yeah, your stuff will be stolen - get over it".  

Frankly, the only part I really mind is them taking the posts and not leaving credit.  If you want to use anything I've written, all I really ask is acknowledgement, just as I give links back to others if I quote from them.  It's just polite. 

Because of the slight feeling of being violated I'm less inclined to post about how I spent the weekend, but it was a bit more manual-labor-intensive than I expected.  Time for a little Tylenol and Celebrex, along with a band-aid or two. 

(note: I used the illustration before, and didn't credit it then... that means I thought I was free to use it... I don't mean to be scraping someone else' stuff!")