Comments

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  Mary E Gallagher August 6, 2010 at 11:00am

  In case you don't get this report, I thought the figures compiled for various cities was most interesting and may come into play in your travel stories.
  http://www.eturbonews.com/17713/best-worst-travel-taxes-top-50-us-d...
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  Tony Tien Huynh August 5, 2010 at 7:10am

  www.oneworldvn.com or www.indochinas.com for Vietnam and Indochina package tours.
  
  Tony
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  Evelyn Kanter August 4, 2010 at 3:28pm

  Right on, David. It's just too easy to google something and use what pops up in the first few listings. (And I should start a new thread about how we turn nouns such as Google into verbs). I just dug into the anti-plagarism software link posted earlier and found a USA Today article from 2006 on the subject. That's around the time of the Jason Blair/New York Times debacle.
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  David Paul Appell August 4, 2010 at 7:03am

  The subject of plagiarism is trickier than ever in the second decade of the 21st century thanks to technology. I read something in the paper (yes, the cellulose version) today or yesterday which pointed out that kids today are having a hard time grasping the fact that recycling text verbatim is a bad thing -- I think Meryl Pearlstein below alluded to this same piece. Well, I remember when I first started getting published on sites like Huffington Post and MSNBC.com not long ago, suddenly I would find myself on a half-bajillion sites I'd never heard of, because they took this original material and "syndicated" it across the Web. This kind of thing of course has its upside, of course, but one definite downside is perpetrating the sense that you can just grab whatever from wherever and use it for whatever.
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  José Balido August 4, 2010 at 6:24am

  10 points for Terence for the Starbucks "Fresco" line!!!
  
  Meryl, I never said that all guidebook writers plagiarize. I only said that one did -- and it cost me a lot of money and lost time. It was just an anecdote of early plagiarism in the Internet age. Most of the other writers on that book did excellent jobs and didn't complain (too much) about the money, and the same holds true for most guidebook writers everywhere. I got one rotten apple, that's all. But in the end I was proud of the book.
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  Meryl Pearlstein August 4, 2010 at 6:15am

  I find that, sadly, when I have guest bloggers or others submit writing to me for consideration, I am forced to read the text with an eye to whether it sounds like they could have written it. With Internet accessibility such as it is and Wikipedia as an "unauthored" source (as the students noted in yesterday's Times article), you have to be ultra-vigilent about content origin. Regarding guidebook writing, I beg to differ, Jose. Not all writers plagiarize due to the low hourly rate - some of us do it because we love what we are writing.
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  Terence Baker August 4, 2010 at 6:11am

  Evelyn, isn't a "fresco" something they serve at Starbucks...hold on, I'm just going to call Fact Checking.
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  Terence Baker August 4, 2010 at 6:10am

  Writers become writers because they feel they have something to say. I would not want to plagiarise as I am sure that I have something to tell that hasn't been said before and that I can tell, at least on this occasion, better...and as Morrissey sang (and it's on The Queen is Dead, a fine record), "If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own, don't plagiarise or take "on loan". There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, and who trips you up and laughs when you fall."
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  Allan Lynch August 4, 2010 at 4:58am

  I forget the name of it, but universities have a service they use checking for academic plagiarism.
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  José Balido August 4, 2010 at 4:48am

  We had a discussion here in Media Only this past February. Here's a link with some plagiarism software resources. Haven't tried any of them, curious to hear if anyone has.

  

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