An update to some newsworthy items dealing with the issues covered recently on maxpower: plagiarism, poets, and spam. The spammers are now stealing your web identification (at least in regards to the blogging world), myspace plagiarism situational irony, and the poets attack again.

The spammers are stealing your identity

Spammers are harvesting genuine comment leaver’s details and using them to leave comment spam with them in an attempt to get past bloggers. [source]

Related MaxPower story: perhaps comment spammers have learned how Akismet can be bad?

MySpace Plagiarism Irony

Randomly Random Thoughts writes:

Here is the deal. If you are gonna rip some one else’s work and try to pass it off as your own: 1) DON’T rip it from a web site that everyone and their grandmother visits. 2) ATLEAST make an attempt to make it look like your own work. Read it, and remove any unnecessary quotes from people that you did obviously not talk to.

Just a girl’s ramblings also writes:

Here is the deal. If you are gonna rip some one else’s work and try to pass it off as your own: 1) DON’T rip it from a web site that everyone and their grandmother visits. 2) ATLEAST make an attempt to make it look like your own work. Read it, and remove any unnecessary quotes from people that you did obviously not talk to.

The strange part is that the two accounts are almost exactly the same… read infringing blogger and digital fingerprints. Also of note are two excellent posts over at plagairism today: Myspace: A Place for Plagiarism?, Part one, and Part Two.

Meanwhile…

Perfunctory poet plagiarist pilfers!

Dutch child poetry plagiarist unmasked
29 March 2006
AMSTERDAM: The 10-year-old winner of a children’s poetry competition had to hand back her prize money after newspaper readers noticed that her poem was the work of a well known writer.

“It’s a mini drama for her. She did not realise it had been written by someone else,” a member of the competition jury said.

“It started as a school project and was followed by many events … probably she just forgot.”

The parents of primary school pupil Fieke agreed to give back the 125 euro prize and the jury admitted it should have recognised the work of children’s author Francine Oomen earlier. [source]

I couldn’t resist making up my own title. Plagiarist poets were discussed earlier in a post on doppelbloggers.