My CCCC presentation

I should have posted my presentation earlier, but better late than never; here's my presentation as a PowerPoint file. The first three slides need a bit of context: they both involve instances in which people plagiarized from my blog. The first one contains an excerpt of an email to me in which the guy said he'd stolen some material "just to get started" with his blog. That's where I came up with the "plagiarism as placeholder" idea. I went to his blog, and I didn't see my posts anymore. I surmised that he had deleted my words and replaced them with his own (or some other not-me person, for all I know).

Of course -- and I should have said this in the presentation -- it did cross my mind that it could just be a $p@m ploy to get Google juice, lest the geeks think I'm utterly unclever. It wouldn't be such a bad idea, actually; start a fake blog at the address that is your soon-to-be Viagra/Cialis/Phentermine site, and purposefully plagiarize some text from a few bloggers. Then make sure they find out somehow, either by emailing them or grabbing images remote-hosted from their sites so that they see the traffic in their referrers. Then, if the bloggers take the bait and link to the offending plagiarist in order to call him/her out and do some public shaming, that translates into a higher Google PageRank for the site, if I understand PageRank correctly. Maybe $p@mm3r$ are already doing this.

And the third slide: The second time someone plagiarized me, it was this post about a first-year composition with a public health theme. I found out about the plagiarism when I saw her site in my referrers; she hadn't linked to me to give me credit for my post, but rather had done the remote-hosted image thing I referred to in the last example. I was irritated about the plagiarism, but I didn't say anything about it here because when I looked at her other posts, they were all in a very OMG ROTFLMAO!!!!!111!!! style. I thought then that if it came down to a dispute, no one would believe that she had written the post.

Finally, here are the links to the sites I cite in my presentation:

Humanity Critic: and as I said in my presentation, I can't recommend him highly enough. He deserves all the weblog awards he has gotten these few years running.

Kuro5hin: The Cruelest Cut and the specific segment of the comment thread.

Copyscape, and their About page.

UPDATE: Here's my presentation in Slideshare: