I noticed that Bill had a post here on a blog that he found that happens to have the exact same content as his blog. Before I forget, I just want to thank him for mentioning me in the same sentence as Don Box, Chris Sells and Charles Carroll. I hope that more people that participate in heisting activities become aware of my posting frequency and target me. Seriously, the activity that Roland discovered and reported to Bill is disturbing, but not surprising. Let's review.
So if I look at the two blogs, Bill's and the Toolblast.com blog (see Bill's post and comments from above; I won't link here as the link magically seems to change and I'll not waste my nor your time following it). The blogs are obviously different. Both have pictures. Bill's has the MVP Crest. The other blog has a picture of an alien eating a human brain that resembles Bill (the alien, not the human brain). But the content in each location is identical.
The pervasive nature of RSS is now a reality. RSS is simple to implement and use. Blogs are simple to implement and use. More and more blog engines now support blog APIs (and metablog APIs) for posting. Much of the security in the blog engine space is weak. I'll not name names. But the idea of the RSS feed was to share and share alike. Aggregators are all over the place for legitimate reuse of RSS content. But those are typical aggregators, not an instantiation of the original content with the misrepresentation of ownership. In fact, look at the following entry on Bill's blog. http://www.toolblast.com/community/showthread.php?t=2013 is the corresponding post on the other blog, but I'll not link this as it will likely change. If you perform a "view source" of the heisted blog, you will notice that the kitty picture link points to: http://webpages.charter.net/william.ryan/Cats.jpg (Note to Bill: Ummmmmm is this picture related to this?). You would think that if the heister was going to heist, he'd do a proper job and steal the pictures as well (since there is not a financial incentive as listed below, the picture heist is less likely; it just provides a clean referral path for Bill).
Let's look at the legal issues. Bill has a copyright notice on his blog. I do not see a notice in the RSS feed. I have a copyright notice on my blog. I do not see a copyright notice in my feed (and I'm an RSS v2.0 feed). I am wondering if there is a location in my blog engine that allows for this information in the RSS feed. Robert Scoble's feed has one. I want one. I just wonder if the copyright on the page protects the RSS feed as well. I'm not an RSS expert. RSS v0.91 supports copyright as an optional element of the schema. RSS v1.0 does not appear to contain a copyright element in the schema. RSS v2.0 does contain the element according to this.
A quick visit here addresses the plagiarism issue in the academic environment. I also recently saw a post on a site that looks to protect your content by looking for other copies of your content online. I cannot remember the name of the service (I'm sure that there is more than one). If you are aware of such a service, please hit my contact button as comments here are inoperative.
After a quick review at toolblast.com (and a quick read of the comments from Bill's post), it is obvious that the heisting blogger has an incentive. The more posts that originate from the blog, the larger the discount that the heist blog owner receives. This appears to be the beginnings of an economy (embryogeny for those of you that follow such things in AI/EC and it's biological metaphor). My first response is that if there is a rise in financial incentives and an opportunity for fraud, then the criminal element will arise and meet the opportunity. Are there sufficient means to discover heisting and countermeasures to stop this activity? How pervasive will this become? I don't know. A proper threat model needs to be constructed to determine the level of protection/loss, etc. At this point, this is likely a small window in the universe. It is not small to Bill, I will grant him that much.
As a quick note, it is worth mentioning that there was a recent discussion on countermeasures on Slashdot here. It discusses posts from here and here. We at JJBR recently did a study of the honey monkeys here. Countermeasures are a difficult activity
The Wisconsin INETA meeting last night was a lot of fun. The post-meeting party was even better. The lower cased one presented on "Multi-Modal Apps: Tablet PC & Speech Development in .NET".
Wisconsin INETA hosted the event and Microsoft once again provided the facilities for the presentation. While I didn't get a head count, the place was almost full, except for the chair next to me (I don't know how to read into that; only a few know my true identity and I was wearing my x-ray glasses).
The presentation started out with a hiccup. Because LiveMeeting uses the microphone and the lower cased one's presentation is on speech and uses the same microphone, there were a few difficulties early and the LiveMeeting session had to be cancelled.
But the show went on. And on it did. The lower cased one first discussed Tablet. He gave an outstanding presentation on Tablet technologies including Ink, stroke and a number of other interesting topics with fully functional demos. He then followed up with Speech technologies. He covered all of the major Speech APIs that are available and had a great discussion on the recent history of Speech APIs. I personally found this interesting, as there are critical areas in Speech technologies that provide no opportunity for growth or integration. Additionally, some of the Speech technologies and APIs were designed for telephony and call-center applications. These technologies have, as a practical matter, "bulked up" on non-speech technologies to provide for an integrated programming model and thus carry extra weight that could be accommodated elsewhere in .Net. VoiceXML was an example of this.
Everyone in the room had a chance to hear Microsoft Mary speak (Mary is the voice in the Speech SDK; apparently there are no male voices). For those women who keep score, I'll just say: Microsoft Mary: 5, the lower cased one: 0. Anytime he made a mistake, Microsoft Mary was actually able to correct him interact with him through the UI. It was great to actually see .Net applications running that were interactive with Speech.
Just when I thought he was about to wind down with time running out, the lower cased one wows the crowd. He brings up one last application. In the application, he uses both Tablet Ink and Speech to do editing, highlighting and other features in an Ink panel. He augments his UI with Speech command-and-control so that he does not lose context while using the Ink Panel. Jaws in the room dropped and there was a round of applause. This was very, very cool.
The folks at Microsoft have done considerable work to make Tablet and Speech technologies a reality. The lower cased one showed how easy within .Net it is to combine and use all of these technologies in simple and useful ways.
Collateral for the presentation may be found here.
I cannot provide links for the post-meeting party. There are pictures, but they are currently being sold being used coercively available elsewhere . . .