Editorial Note: Readers are requested to read the comments before making any judgement about anyone.
For quiet sometime now Vivek Puri a young and opinionated blogger is complaining about blatant plagiarism of his leads by some big shots without acknowledgement. He grew desperate and suggested that a new blog tracker be developed that not only shows whats hot in the blogosphere but also visualize who got the scoop first hand and who later leeched onto it. In simple words he wants blog and meme trackers to show posts around a certain topic in chronological order.
I covered the entire event here, and discussed an incident that happened prior to it. A few hours back few hours back when i visited Startup Squad, I found a post regarding JobCoin. I found the service interesting and thought of reviewing it after I get my hands free from other stuff. The story was certainly not reported on Mashable by that time and appeared on it afterwards. The reason I am so sure about it is because I keep all the startup and web 2.0 focused blogs opened in multiple firefox tabs and refresh them simultaneously when I get free from a review.
A few minutes ago as I visited Startup Squad again it had this “AH! Suckers at Mashable are as usual copying my leads. God save blogosphere from these thankless assholes.” added to the updated Jobcoin post. Kirsten Nicole the one who covered Jobcoin on Mashable responded to it by saying that They got the tip late last night.
This poses 2 interesting questions:
- If they really got it last night, why they waited for Startup Squad to cover it first ?
- If there is nothing fishy about it, why Startup Squad´s trackback moderated on Mashable, while other comments and a trackback is allowed ?
Clearly something doesn’t smell right here. This is the second controversy to grip the blogosphere within a week after the death threats to Kathy Sierra. Are the big guys really sucking the young ones blood ? Is David once again against a Goliath ? Does this also comes with the territory ? The answers to these I honestly don’t have. But one thing is for sure, blogosphere seriously needs a code of conduct (something on which Sam Sethi claims to be working in this post).
Update 1: See Pete Cashmore´s comments
Update 2: Pete send me a personal email with a press release that the Jobcoin co founder send to Mashable. I have made the press release publicly available here for everyone to see. I am saddened that I might have delivered an untrue picture of Mashable and hurt that I might have played into someone´s game. I am still waiting for Vivek to clarify the situation as to what made him think Mashable blatantly plagiarized his leads.
Update 3: Vivek has responded and things have gone ugly. I now have no way to decide which side of the picture is shiny and which one is hazy, so from now onwards its up to the readers to decide.
David Vs Goliath, image taken from Miss Rogue’s (Tara Hunt) flickr photo stream.
Hi guys,
Not sure why Vivek posted that – Kristen knows the founder and got sent the press release last night. We forwarded this to Vivek, so he’s aware. We’ve had incidents like this with SS before, accusing us of not linking when we had. He later sent over an apology. I’m trying to speak to SS today to clear things up.
Also note that SS covered StreetAdvisor after us: did they copy, or was a press release sent to all the bloggers?
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OK, I forwarded the press release Kristen got last night. Hopefully that clears things up. Many thanks.
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Pete I have no grudge against anyone. Just reported this as i saw the event taking place. If you see the post on Vivek´s blog in my initial comment I asked him to get in touch with you immediately.
The same comment is posted on your blog too.
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Kathy is not only a victim, but she made one out of others…
http://duckdown.blogspot.com/
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I shared this with Vivek as well, but I have known Kristen for awhile and have talked about JobCoin with her in addition to talking with her last night about our upcoming launch.
Hopefully that clears things up.
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admin,
Like your blog a lot. I’m not going to waste too much time on this…I sent over the correspondence between Kristen and the Jobcoin founder that’s timestamped last night. That corrects the factual errors in this post.
You might not know, but Vivek did this previously with another post (Streakr) and later issued an apology. If his tactic is to accuse Mashable unjustly to get attention, then we won’t tolerate that. I forgave Vivek the first mistake (everyone gets hot headed) and I’ve been trying to call him today so we can also put this hot headed bout behind us. But, he has repeatedly made unjust accusations and tried to spread those through our trackbacks, so I’m just gonna remove his future attempts to do so unless we can resolve something on the phone today.
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Pete I am sorry for any part that I have in this. I have just reported what happened as it happened. At the end of the day we all might find out if this was intentional or not.
I can send out a personal email to you, but the only reason I am posting this here is for the public to know all about it. One thing that surprised me is that Vivek has made a new post without actually replying to the comments on the Jobcoin post.
I tried to contact him via the chat with the blogger option but with no success..
Tell me what to do ? Shall I take down this post ?
In the end I just want to say your swift response has really killed the controversy in its infancy.
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As i have written before, this is not the first time Mashable has plagiarized posts from other blogs, whether it is mine or someone else. Even in my talk with Pete few days bacl, he has accepted that he does take content from other blogs without intentionally linking back. I think this is what social media has come to. All i want to do is change this attitude.
As for SteetAdvisor, StartupSquad.com works with the PR company handling the campaign for StreetAdvisor(i have covered more companies from the same PR company before). The embargo for posting on StreetAdvisor was 6 AM PST on that day. Breaking embargoes is something Mashable has always been good at. I waited for 6 AM PST to happen while Mashable posted much before that, which explains why Mashable got there before me.
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admin,
In the spirit of open dialogue, just put a message at the top that says something like “CORRECTION: The Jobcoin founder added a comment to say he did tell Kristen from Mashable about this last night, and we were sent an email that backs up Mashable’s side.”
Ironically, you’ll notice that Vivek’s latest post is about something we covered on Mashable 2 days ago.
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Oh, and Vivek just deleted my comments from his blog, so he can hardly say that we’re censoring him if we decide to do the same.
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Just as a proof of blatant copying of articles look at the following post from mashable: http://mashable.com/2007/03/08/searchles-tv-picasa-web-albums-google-finance-video-myyahoo-tamango
Pete gets the spelling for Tamago wrong(he writes it as Tamango) ’cause he had copied from StartupSquad. However i realized my mistake and made the change, which he never did.
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Vivek -
It becomes clearer with everything you write who the asshole is – starting with that first ignorant, rude accusation – you owe Pete and Kristen a public apology.
Look up “plagiarism” & avoid any further embarrassment. I couldn’t give a damn who breaks the story – you all get the same PR – Mashable just writes well and covers more and doesn’t cover crap, so we prefer to read their take on it!
Relax – bottom line, you’re not that good that Mashable needs to take from you mate – or even read you.
Pete – FWIW, you could provide more helpful citations than “(via)”
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You don’t really seem to be grown up
Above links from Vivek pretty much prove the case. I think Pete owes an apology in this case
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Mohan –
You also go look up “plagiarism” and get back to us. Now look up “obnoxious” and tell me again why Vivek should not apologize for making false accusations (confirmed by Jobcoin’s founder) and for insulting Pete & Kristen.
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“us” ?
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Cool…
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Cool.
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Nice!
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Nice…
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Interesting…
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Hey,
This is the first time I stopped in, but the blog looks pretty interesting. It appears that you have someone spamming the crap out of your blog. I know that it suck to have to put a captcha in but it might help stop this in the future. You can also check out project honeypot. I will definitely be back to check out your stuff. Keep up the good work!!
Sincerely,
Terrell Harris
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Hm… generally I agree with you, but I wonder what our readers would tell.
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