Former blog
In the wake of the closing of the Miles for Family blog, a few other bloggers such as Doc and TBB offered their thoughts about blogging. To hear them tell it, it’s a lot of hard work and headaches. But you know what? Those guys are a bunch of whiners. Blogging is awesome! And even better, it’s a guaranteed way to make easy money–fast!
I’m here today to tell you how it’s done. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you my super-awesome Road to Internet Wealth Version 1.0! [Read more…]
Look who’s back on the Prior2Boarding homepage–it’s The Forward Cabin!
The blog was very quietly removed from the homepage a few weeks ago after yours truly broke the story of another credible plagiarism accusation. For those of you keeping up with the scandal, I’ve put together a FAQ:
Q: Has James apologized or admitted guilt?
A: No. He did take down the page that I initially noticed, however, since it was obviously copied and even he couldn’t defend it.
Q: Did BoardingArea founder Randy Petersen apologize?
A: Yes.
Q: Publicly?
A: I’m not aware of any public acknowledgment of the plagiarism scandal on his part.
Q: So are you ticked off at BoardingArea?
A: No, not at all. There are a lot of great bloggers there and I continue to read them daily. In fact, it would not surprise me one bit if James has rubbed some of his fellow BA bloggers the wrong way as well. James notwithstanding, they don’t like plagiarism any more than I do, and they’ve even published helpful advice based on their own experiences being plagiarized. Based on my correspondence with James, I get the feeling that he’s an overly ambitious, unethical, resumé-padding weenie. Those types wear out their welcome in the long run.
Q: Upon discovering your work had been stolen, why did you decide to post about it rather than to reach out behind the scenes?
A: There are different shades of gray with this stuff. If somebody is a little bit lazy or sloppy, that’s not a big deal and I’d reach out in a friendly, non-public way. (Though I’ll note that I’ve never even had to do that before.) We’re all human, and we all make mistakes. But if he appropriates an entire post to pass off as his own, that’s another matter entirely. If somebody does that, then odds are it’s not an isolated case and raising a stink about it is the way to go.
Q: I understand multiple people have questioned your professionalism for handling things this way.
A: Yes… but then, those people would stand to benefit from my keeping quiet.
That’s all the Q&A for today, folks! Stay tuned for further developments!
Oh, and I’m blocked from following you-know-who on Twitter, so I’ll just have to imagine what he’s posting. Here’s my best guess…
I recently wrote about what looks for all the world like a clear-cut case of plagiarism by The Forward Cabin, a BoardingArea blog. Last week our esteemed leader Matt contacted Randy Petersen, the owner of BoardingArea, to express our concerns.
We’re still waiting back to hear from Randy. In the meantime, I reached out to the good folks at First2Board, another collections of points and miles blogs unaffiliated with either Saverocity or BoardingArea, to see if they’d ever had any issues with folks plagiarizing their work. My reasoning was that anybody who plagiarizes this sort of stuff won’t do it just once; they’ll keep doing it again and again until external events cause them to reconsider their choices.
And sure enough, they actually did have a problem just a few months ago with our favorite blogger:
Jamison, in case you didn’t know, does the Points Summary blog over at F2B. The subject matter of the posts was a promotion American Airlines was running where you could receive 7,500 AA miles for test-driving a Cadillac. Jamison’s post, on October 17, 2014, was entitled “How to Receive 7,500 AAdvantage Miles Without Test Driving a Cadillac”. The Forward Cabin post, published October 20, 2014, was called “How to receive the 7,500 AA miles WITHOUT test driving a car”.
How to get 7,500 AA miles without a test drive is not a popular blogging topic. That, plus the timing, leads me to think that Jamison has a point. What do you think?
Four days ago I published a quick piece on Citi’s new Access credit card. I hadn’t seen this product mentioned anywhere before, as there had been no grand announcement from Citi.
Today, I happened to see this on the BoardingArea.com home page:
Great! Somebody else noticed the card, I told myself. Let’s see if they have anything of interest to say.
Except when I actually read the post, it sounded very familiar to me. Not only did I not see anything new, I just saw everything that I had written, no more.
The tip-off is right at the very beginning:
For the the last 20-something years, Citi has sponsored an AT&T Universal Card, which essentially gave you 10% off AT&T services (think of it like a gas station card where you receive 5 cents off every gallon).
I don’t think it’s common knowledge that the AT&T Universal Card is 20 years old. I know a lot about credit cards, but I only knew this because I worked for AT&T Universal Card for a couple of years in the late ’90s.
Additionally, author James Larounis adds a factual error with his intro: Citi has not sponsored the AT&T card for 20-something years. They bought the entire operation from AT&T in 1997, and if memory serves that deal closed in early 1998. I can’t say for certain, but it looks for all the world as though he introduced this error into his post when rewriting my post to sound like his own.
There are other similarities between the posts. He devotes a paragraph to Citi’s definition of retail websites, as do I. He even closes his post with a gratuitous reference to Amazon Payments, as do I.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that there’s plenty of idea-borrowing on the internet. There’s only so much to write about and we all read each other. It’s inevitable, and I’m okay with that.
There are two things I’m not okay with, however: Failing to give a hat tip to the original source, and repackaging somebody else’s content as your own. It appears to me that both have taken place here, but I thought I’d run this by my readers. What do you think?
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