Did I miss the mandatory ad blog etiquette meeting? I must have, because not one, but four, prominent ad bloggers have gone out of their way to school me recently.
Ad-Rag’s DaBitch wanted to know why I felt the need to “take” copyrighted photos from Flickr.
I thought
“Additional Information
This photo is public © All rights reserved ”
Meant that you can’t repost it. Or shant rather, because clearly, you can.
Then, Piers Fawkes of PSFK objected to my coverage of the ads-on-eggs story, while questioning why I could not recall every last bit of ad trivia.
It’s not “yet another medium for advertising” – it’s an old medium whose time came and went. Remember?
Piers went on to say much nastier things on his IF blog. But none of this compares to today’s admonition from Steve Hall, the king of all ad bloggers.
I’ve refrained from saying anything about this for a long time, your practice of pasting content from other’s blogs and news organizations without adding much, if any, of your own words is, well, troubling.
Sure blogging is about linking and all that but many bloggers, myself included do a lot of hard work to write original stories that, while yes they may link to other content, provide the reader with something new, informative, insightful and hopefully rewarding.
Your blog is getting a lot of notoriety now and sooner or later people may not take kindly to this editorial approach.
And he was correct, for BL Ochman added her two cents in a timely manner.
It’s not that I don’t want you to point to my stories. It’s that you used my post verbatim but did not put it in quotes and say “B.L. Ochman wrote:….
That is what I do on my blog and what I would appreciate you doing when you quote me in the future.
That is also what my and a lot of other bloggers’ Creative Commons licenses require when our content is used.
What you wrote is the headline, and it’s a good one. There is a way to do this that is fair, and it’s not the one you have chosen to use.
I work in advertising. Thus, my skin is elephant-like. In other words, I’m open to criticism and regularly learn from it.
I always link back to the content I lift. How that violates the nonexistent style guide we’re all working from, I’m still trying to understand. But with all the help I’m getting, I’m sure it’ll become clear in no time.
