Duane: well, that’s models for you, I guess. I think for most swipes of that type, naivety is more likely than malice. I had a similar issue with a photo I took being used on another site without attribution, but in that case it was more an oversight by a knows-better user than an abuse.

Is there anything that can be done about it? Not a lot, except chase the offenders down one by one.

Since Matt Drudge went from…nothing…to Drudge Report to radio talk show host, he’s a pretty good example.

Most bloggers don’t become journalists (in the reporter sense) because “reporter” is the journalist job you get before you go on to better things. So there’s lots of bloggers who got paying writing gigs out of their blog-reputation (Glenn Reynolds, many, many more…).

The trick is that for a lot of the most popular bloggers, their weblog is the place where they can make the most money.

In addition to myself, there were also photographers there being paid for their time — I was doing it for free. Some of the models afterwards asked if they could look at some of their shots, so I gave them a link to my flickr site where most of them were. The next day, while browsing through facebook, I noticed that pretty much every model that I had talked to had taken multiple shots from my flickr site and put them on their site without any sort of attribution or credit at all. This is something I routinely am forced to deal with. It’s one thing if I was paid for the event, but I wasn’t. All of them corrected it after I pointed out that I was bothered by it, but we seem to live in an age where people feel they are entitled to anything they can surf to on the internet.

Speaking of copying and pasting, I can speak for most major hockey sites, that they copy and paste from the Associated Press without added opinions. That includes Sportsnet and TSN to name 2.

I see more and more tv news shows referencing blogs all the time. I think that blogging isn’t going away anytime soon and that the power bloggers have will only keep increasing.

A great post by you. You do very well on this site and should be proud of what you have accomplished. But hang in there. To me, it seems like your presence as a voice in Vancouver is growing isn’t it?

Myself, on the other hand. I’m more the Don Cherry of blogging. I am politically incorrect and a badass who doesn’t pull punches. So I don’t know if that ruins the reputation of ‘decent’ bloggers or not, but I refuse to hold back.

Great post/topic. I was inspired to become a blogger after coming across two very different blogs – 1. Darren Barefoot’s site; and 2. Fake Handbags v3.0.. My main interests are music and visual arts. Back in 2006, my friend John who works at The North Shore News, directed the NSN Managing Editor to my blog – that Managing Editor was interested in my writing and my many musings on Morrissey and The Smiths – he asked John if he thought I might be interested in writing Morrissey’s album review for the paper. I was surprised but took the challenge anyway. He told John, “I can’t pay her, but she can get published.” I gather that’s how most writers begin. Since my May 2006 article as a Contributing Writer, he’s always sent me the latest list of CDs up for review. I’ve been able to have my articles on Snow Patrol, The Beautiful South, Grant-Lee Philips, Sparklehorse, Mat Kearney and Matthew Good published. At the end of last year, they asked me to submit my Top Ten Albums of 2006. So in the end, though you may not get paid for your opinions, but in community papers, you can surely have a respectable voice. Personally I love writing music articles. It’s the only thing keeping me sane in a job that is completely void of creativity!

Thanks,
Stephanie

I am indeed writing from a basement (well, as they call them nowadays in the ever-booming, over-priced real estate market in Vancouver, ‘ground level suite’… the result of well, having to pay premium price for small places hehe. But that’s another story…

I absolutely concur with you that many mainstream media outlets look down on bloggers. The debate blogging vs. mainstream media is similar to other debates where there is no definite answer. I can see the issue of training and codes of ethics. But I can also see how msm fails to portray the issues and creates a whole mess.

I don’t know if you have heard about a study in the US by Professor Robert Putnam where some msm (particularly conservatives, anti-immigration types) portrayed his conclusions as saying that ethnic diversity leads to a decrease in social capital (Putnam’s paper can be interpreted in many ways, but I personally don’t think that’s what he is saying). Instances of erroneous portrayals of issues by msm are a dime a dozen.

The msm does pick up on stories by bloggers. danah boyd wrote a half-baked blog post on an apparent racial divide between MySpace and Facebook users and the BBC reported it as “a six month scientific study”. It was a blog post!!! That’s a problem when msm gets their stories out of blogs.

You are someone whose code of ethics and conduct in the blogosphere I try to follow. I personally have learned a lot from you, and still consider myself a newbie Vancouver blogger. For example, when you mentioned photo credits, I ran and checked whether I had credited all my photos. When you e-mail me to talk to me about citing a post of mine, I always appreciate it. Same thing when you invite me as a guest blogger. I even invited a friend of mine (with full attribution) as a guest blogger on my own blog, following your lead!

Long story made short, this is a great post, one that will definitely stir up a conversation. I think that all we can do, is try to write as ethically and passionately as we can. This week I had someone send me an anonymous nasty comment on a restaurant review I did, and I was like “oh wow, way to go Raul, you’ve managed to piss off a reader”. The comment writer, however, probably does not not know that I recorded the IP address

Anyhow, great post, as always