Blog Herald recently did a guest series (written by Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today) on tools to help fight plagiarism, focused on how to track-down a plagiarist, get through to their webhost, and expose other sites in their network.

Worth reading, so here are part 1, part 2 and part 3. Nothing too complex really, but nice to have a refresh of the options available. n the subject of plagiarism in general, I'd recommend adding Plagiarism Today to your RSS reader.

The Oiwan Lam case has been all over the Internet, or at least some of the Internet. This case is important if you've got a site hosted in Hong Kong. A good summary of the case is here and there's an MP3 recording with Oiwan Lam being interviewed by the BBC

Facebook is a tool with a lot of potential for making content 'go viral'. I think it's an immature tool that will come under competition and it, or one of it's competitors, will eventually open (just as AOL did in the 90s) but in the mean time if you have a website, it's important to use and use soon. That's my opinion.

Ryan, inspired by Kim had the idea of a group writing project: If I Knew Then What I Know Now. Nice idea, should help a few others out; here is my spin, Internet related:

I've been tweaking the site a little, please update your feed links. Lots of content is awaiting!

News and Commentary Feed: http://www.chinawebmasters.org/feed"
Commentary Feed (any site member can post commentary): http://www.chinawebmasters.org/blog/feed
Recommended News Feed: http://www.chinawebmasters.org/news/feed
All Comments: http://www.chinawebmasters.org/crss

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Cheers,

Alex

I aggregate content. Other websites aggregate content. The biggest content aggregator I know of in the China-related web is Chinalyst and they're very cool about it. I submitted this site's RSS feed, get summaries posted there, and generate a bit of traffic back to this site. Chinalyst has a huge huge amount of potential in terms of giving back useful information, which it's yet to develop, it's a shame I didn't start it earlier, but it's given me a few other ideas.

Then there's the opposite end of the scale: I just found out about New Chinese, New China who quote entire articles in full and do not link back or attribute them.

Chris sent me this link. It's a topic we've spoken about before, discussing different websites and (my, more than his) level of jadedness regarding how they treat their users.

As the article mentions, contribution is nothing new. Linux, the operating system that drives much of the Internet, big business, science and academia, has it's principals in volunteer development (and interesting link discussing who actually paid for an developed the most recent kernel patches here). In reality being an expert in Linux, and contributing to the kernel, is something that can enhance one's CV as well as gain/reinforce one's reputation and network of contacts - there is monetary benefit from being a volunteer.