Dear Website Administrator,

I am sorry if you consider your website as a blog but it clearly isn’t one and you should stop your blog if you intend to maintain it in this way. Though I wasted a lot of time and energy digging deep I couldn’t find when you exactly started the PC-Guide category on your blog, which is a reproduction of That Damn PC.

I did not sign up for your free online backup services and I was told that the previous bloggers here at That Damn PC did not either. I once again request you to stop copying every single post from me or anybody else. You must have received a “Cease & Desist” notification from the Legal department of b5media a month ago. It was sent to you and another member of your brotherhood. The other member thankfully took it seriously enough, but you have continued to doggedly pursue your act of cloning.

While your unrequited link love has brought me a lot of frustration and lost me a lot of traffic, I also thank you for enabling me to ponder about the concept of blog cloning and the types of blog fraud. I am willing to wait till the end of this year because patience is a virtue. After that, it would be utterly stupid of me to not explore ways of dealing with website plagiarism.

Regards,
Sravan

I started this month as the new damn PC guy and ended it by buying a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 in one of the Black Friday deals though I wish I had won a PC in a giveaway.

I had been opinionated about using push buttons and organizing program files, worried about the rising types of blog fraud and spam mail, conscious about the precautions to be taken in a cyber cafe and disposing e-waste responsibly, sad about the layoffs and the Mumbai attacks, and excited about the Ancient Rome 3D and the LIFE photo archive projects. I also began an ongoing series on Cygwin: pre-introduction, introduction, installation. For all the things in between, refer the November archives.

I thank the readers for stopping by here, the fellow bloggers for link love, the spammers for spam that couldn’t be caught by Akismet, and the fraud bloggers for blog clones. Or not.

Looking forward to a better blogging experience this December.

Readers looking for PC tips are requested to skip this post. Having found that That Damn PC has become a victim of blog fraud, it is my duty to alert the community.

Blogging is increasingly being seen as a sustainable model of income. Where money is involved in large sums, there is also fraud. Problogging is perhaps at too early a stage to discuss at length about blog fraud, but there is undoubtedly an upward trend in these cases.

A blog with too many advertisements, IMHO, is not a fraudulent blog. It is simply a bad idea, and sometimes not altogether bad either.

Here are three common types I have come across:

Fake Blogs: The Internet provides a mask for users, allowing them to lurk anonymously. This is true in the case of blogs as well, though less frequently. While bloggers using a fake name is not necessarily fraudulent, nor is it unlawful by default, there are instances where fake bloggers abuse their anonymity to defame or hurt or cheat organizations or people or readers.

Sell-out Blogs: Affiliate blogging means selling products through blogs, which is good because the sale often comes through a feature overview and a review, and the reader can make a decision based on that. But unlike salesmen who believe in the product they sell, sell-outs have a pride in selling even trash. Sell-out bloggers excessively do affiliate blogging, providing positive reviews to every product they come across.

Pseudo Blogs: While sell-out bloggers take pains in creating original content, however untrue that may be, pseudo bloggers have tons of content all of which is dutifully lifted from elsewhere. The shrewder psuedo blogs post content taken from other not-so-popular blogs so that readers don’t easily recognize the content. Some take a step further and make disclaimers that they mostly pump feeds from various blogs across the Internet. However, no acknowledgements nor links to the original source are ever made, unless by accident.

You can help curb blog fraud. When you suspect a blog as fraudulent, raise an alert in any open forum. The best remedy is to inform the original source if possible.