JBot Mania

Well, I went through all of my posts and singled out those with questionable quotations of content from other sites. In most cases I was able to trim down to enticing excerpts that will drive readers to the site of origin. This is how it should be.

There were a few posts whose content I wanted to keep but that were so long that I didn’t have time to go through them and make better use of only selected material from the articles in this quick pass. I made them private instead of deleting them. This way I can keep the content for editing later but I am no longer contributing the content theft. Other bloggers may want to consider doing this as well.

One suspect post I simply deleted because I wasn’t very enamored of the subject and knew that I would never take the time to update it to work within my new standards for content use. Much like most of my belongings that no longer fit in this new smaller house, out it went. It won’t be missed. It wasn’t linked to by anyone—not to be confused with 99% of my blog.

One final suspect post was also deleted because the original source no longer existed. If I had gotten permission then I would keep what I had, but I didn’t have that permission, so out it went too. In the grand scheme of things, this post was a fairly minor offense. I also didn’t much care about it so it wasn’t hard to delete. If I had loved the content, I am not sure if I would have been so ready to delete it. But, it was my job to have gotten permission in the first place.

From now on, I am going to do my best. If I am going to quote, then I am going to comment thoughtfully on it, which, for me, eliminates the debate because I am responding to content, much like you would respond in an essay or position paper. I’ll cite my sources and I will only quote what is necessary to construct my argument.

As for quoting things that I think are “cool”. I am going to try to do less of that, or put more effort into talking about it. Just posting a link to something else without any insight is pretty lazy. This will be the hardest, though, and I know I will slip into my habit of doing just this. I’m striving here. I cannot guarantee success. Some of the purpose of my blog has been to point out funny or interesting things—like 99% of the other blogs out there, but I want to strive for better and so I do.