There is a difference between Blogging & Plagiarizing!

I have a lot of friends on twitter. I haven't met most of them in real life, but I chat with them quite often. One such 'friend' was @AnkitBathija. I did consider him a friend.

He describes himself as a 'Interactive Marketing Practitioner, digital media whatever' among other things. Recently he tweeted a link to one of his blog posts on his 'social media blog' so I went to check it out & comment because, hey! I'm a blogger & I like commenting on fellow blogger's posts.

The post in question was named 'WHY TWITTER IS LIKE A ONE NIGHT STAND'.

(Here is a screenshot of the post, in case the blogger decides to take it down after he reads this:

I liked the posts. It was incredibly well written. I have conversed with the said blogger, so I knew this was too well written to have been written by him. So I copied a few lines from the post (as-is) & googled. And I came across the original article. Why Twitter is like a one night stand by Andrew Hunt.

The article is plagiarized almost word for word. It annoyed me, so I asked Ankit Bathija whether he wrote the post himself. He said Yes, taking the credit for the well written post. I told him I know the origin of the post. He quickly deleted the comments. This was a couple of days ago. Today I woke to find some mean comments on my previous blog post. In that comment, a commenter called 'anatha' with only an email id & no blog has accused me of plagiarizing posts. Not only that, he claims I have plagiarized more than 30 posts. Now that's a laugh. Anyway, in over 2 years of blogging, I got my first ever flaming comment. Is it a co-incidence that I get a comment falsely accusing me of being a plagiarizer after I caught a real one?

That's not all, actually. I looked around a little more on Ankit's blog. Check out the screenshot below.

The bottom right of this picture above has him claiming that he has 1300+ feed subscribers.  I got suspicious for two reasons.

a)He does not use a feedburner chicklet that I have in my sidebar. You can't fake a chicklet. I have 276 feed subscribers as of now. 276 real subscribers (thank you readers!). On the other hand, it's super easy to just fake a number.

b) A pathetic blog that plagiarizes whole articles & doesn't have a single comment on most posts has 1300 subscribers? That's a joke.

So I did a little tech detective work. The link to his feed is here. I googled & found a legit way to find someone's real feed subscribers when they aren't showing it. Legit, non hacking. Just key in a url. Using that method, I found his true feed subscribers- See for yourself.

He has 32 subscribers. And he claims that he has 1300. Here's the link to see it for yourself.

Usually I would ignore such misguided humans. But I felt this needed to be told.

I don't know why such pathetic creatures even call themselves bloggers. They should call themselves 'copy-pasters' or just plagiarizers. I haven't bothered to check the other posts on his blog but I'm pretty certain they are obtained the same way.

These people give real bloggers a bad name! *sigh*

Let me know what you think? Have you ever come across plagiarizing bloggers? Or got nasty comments from anonymous cowards? Let me know!

UPDATE: The said 'blogger' has put up a post on his blog defending himself.

He has cooly edited the post now citing Andrew as the author & claims that he had Andrew Hunt credited in the author box all along. Does he think I'm stupid? Copying from other blogs is unethical but I wouldn't have said a thing if he had credited the right author. But he didn't. He cited himself as the author & when I asked him whether he wrote it he said yes. He obviously deleted those comments so I don't have any proof. But I was smart enough to take lots of screenshots before writing this post. So check this screenshot:

Go ahead, magnify the screenshot. It is the same article I have talked about & it clearly shows that he cited himself as the author. Don't believe me? Go checkout this cached screenshot from google of the said post on 19th April. Again, you can see for yourself that he cited himself as the author. How pathetic.

Waiting to see how many more lies he tells to try & cover his tracks. Sorry Ankit, your lies aren't going to fool me!

xo,