Tam Harbert

Every few years, some big trend comes along in the technology industry that drives marketing spending through the roof. It creates a flood of advertising in the trade publications and a tsunami of marketing materials, such as white papers and case studies, as companies scramble to position themselves on the cutting edge of this new trend, whatever it is. In the 1990s, it was the Internet itself. Many of us journalists remember the “Everything Internet” wave, when our publications were booming and people who could write about the Internet and World Wide Web were golden. In fact, more than a few journalists, including my boss at the time, were lured by high salaries and stock options from their lowly profession to join Internet startups.

Today, it is Cloud Computing. “The Cloud” may indeed change computing forever, but no one really understands quite how yet. That doesn’t stop people from writing about it, however. Companies are again clamoring for people who can write about the nebulous technology. Publications want to be regarded as the most authoritative source of cloud news. (One editor told me: “We want to be known as the expert on all-things-cloud.”) And yet few really know what they are talking about. In most cases, it’s more like a Rorschach test, with companies projecting what they hope cloud will do for their business. They spend big on advertising to crow about how their products and services relate to the cloud. And they churn out a never-ending stream of white papers and “thought-leadership” articles to show that they understand what cloud computing is and how it will affect the industry.

It’s whistling past the graveyard. The basic idea of cloud computing – that someone else owns and runs the computer and you just buy the service (like Google Apps) – is scaring most hardware and software companies to their core. After all, what happens to their business model if most individuals and corporations no longer buy computers or applications? Better to talk loudly about how cloud actually creates a need for whatever they are selling.

For freelancers like me, who specialize in technology and business, cloud computing has been a boon. Last year, as companies started recovering from the economic body blow of 2008, they restored marketing departments’ budgets. After a very lean year in 2010, I suddenly had a wealth of assignments all about the cloud. Take any topic that I might otherwise have written a story about a couple of years ago – computer security, for example. Now it is a story about computer security in the cloud. Mainframe computers? How mainframes can be used to create clouds. Storage technology? How to store data in the cloud. At least 50 percent of my work last year was related to cloud. And so it seems to be going this year as well.

We journalists like to complain about the hype in the high tech industry. We sometimes accuse marketers of trying to create FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in order to sell their products. But, at least in this case, the FUD fallout from cloud is selling my product and paying my bills. Let it rain!

A writer’s personal brand is becoming increasingly valuable. As a freelancer, I establish my brand through networking – both in person and via social networking. I spend a lot of time showing people what I know, what I do and how well I do it. I have a website. I blog. I post links to my stories and I comment on relevant news topics on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. My hope is that as people get to know me, they will come to appreciate my talent, knowledge and judgment, and thus when they need my services, will hire me.

Full-time staff writers and editors also are out there promoting their brands. They post under their own name on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to promote their articles. They also post professional items that are of interest to other journalists. And they post about their daily personal lives as well, just as I do.

We’re all trying to build up high numbers of high-quality connections, or “followers.” However, full-time employees are also promoting their employers. Employed journalists are expected to post stuff to promote certain articles in their publications and events sponsored by their publishers. So, whose followers are they? The writer’s or the employer’s?

That’s the question at the heart of a lawsuit brought against Noah Kravitz by his former employer. In 2010, Kravitz quit his job at Phonedog.com, a publisher of news on mobile devices and platforms, and took his 17,000 Twitter followers with him. The company is suing, saying the list of Twitter followers is a customer list, according to the New York Times.

There are some wrinkles here. Kravitz started the Twitter account and built up his followers while he was a full-time employee, under the Twitter handle Phonedog_Noah, according to the Times. When he left he changed his handle to NoahKravitz, but says that his employer agreed that he could take the followers if he twittered about the company from time to time. Apparently, though, there is nothing in writing.

Lawyers in several news reports say the Twitter handle is key to who’ll win the lawsuit. They imply that if he’d tweeted under his own name all along, then he would own the followers. But, would he? It’s one thing if the writer came to the job, bringing his followers with him, or if he had developed a following for tweeting about something besides his full-time employment. But what if he developed his expertise and his followers while at the employer? The employer may have a good argument for retaining the followers.

Freelancers may be a bit more aware of how our ability to attract an audience increases our value. My editors have told me they want me to write another story for them because of how many hits my stories get. I don’t have a particularly stellar social network, but most of my editors do want me to tweet and post about that story of mine that they are running this week. At writers’ conferences, I’ve heard book publishers say that they consider the number of Twitter followers and other social media numbers of the author when they are evaluating whether to publish a book. Who doesn’t want a ready-made readership? In fact, I won’t be surprised if that eventually becomes a standard question in job interviews.

So I’d like to poll my own social network on this topic. Does anyone know of other cases where a journalist left his job and tussled with his employer over his social network? For my full-time employed colleagues: do you think you’re more valuable to an employer because of your numerous followers? Does it help ensure your job security? Does it make you more attractive to your next employer? Freelancers: how helpful is your social network in impressing editors?

With the explosion of online publishing, many people are now posting words on the web and calling themselves journalists. But a good proportion of them are more like plagiarists.

I recently got a first-hand lesson in this. While preparing to pitch a story idea to an editor, I googled “mainframes and private cloud computing.” Not the most interesting topic in the world, and not one that’s been widely covered. So I wasn’t surprised when a story that I’d done earlier in the year popped up several times on the first page of the search results. (My publisher owns lots of magazines and buys the rights to run my stories in all of them.)

But I was looking for fresh information, so I went to the second and third page of the search results. I clicked on a link at a website purporting to cover all-things-cloud. As I read the article I found there, I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. Here was an executive at IBM being quoted saying the exact same things about mainframe computers that he had told me. I know these guys are often coached on their “messaging,” but these were specific comments to specific questions that I’d asked during our interview. It was clear that the writer had lifted them from my article. There was no mention of my article nor the publication in which it appeared. It sounded as if the author had interviewed the IBM executive himself.

I notified my editor of the plagiarism and she kicked it to her higher ups to see what to do. The answer: not much.

“At any given time hundreds (possibly thousands) of Web sites are republishing entire stories [from our publications] without our permission,” says the response that my editor e-mailed to me. “About 50% of the time, we wind up doing nothing.” The publisher will take action under several circumstances, including when it’s a professional publisher’s site, when the site is running ads alongside the content, or when the site is plagiarizing entire stories repeatedly. But most of the people who do this “are lay publishers who’ve never heard of the Fair Use law and have no understanding of search engine optimization. They often think they’re doing us a favor, in fact.”

In other words, many of these so-called publishers think plagiarism is OK. How depressing.

Nevertheless, my publisher suggests that editors contact the offending site and nicely ask them to remove the story or at least acknowledge and link to the original source.

In my case, there was no contact information on the website for the writer, nor the editor. In fact, there was no information on who was publishing or funding the website. Clicking the “about” tab told me only that the site was launched in 2009, is done with “a team of content creators from around the globe” and “is one of the fastest growing cloud computing media sites on the Web.” I clicked on “contact,” and got only a form to fill out. There was no address, phone number or e-mail. This is not uncommon. Even when a publisher wants to take legal action against plagiarism, the lawyers sometimes can’t find anyone to which they can address a cease and desist order.

My editor and I tracked down the writer through LinkedIn – he happens to be an MBA student at a major U.S. university – and sent him an e-mail about the offense. Within an hour, we received a response from his publisher:

“After reviewing the article and discussing with [the writer], we have no problems citing your article regarding the quote. [The writer] had mentioned that he did not realize that this was an exclusive. Eitherway [sic], we’ll make the change to the article citing [your publication] as a source of the quote. We’ve also indicated to [the writer] to clearly define the source of any future quotes.”

It was not signed by an actual person, but rather with the name of the website itself, so we still do not know who runs the operation. Likewise, the return e-mail was the generic email@thewebsite.com.

Lay publisher, indeed. The fact that this publisher thinks that it’s OK to use any content that is not marked as “exclusive” shows his lack of publishing experience, not to say his disrespect of copyright law.

This whole thing piqued my curiosity, so I used an online plagiarism detector, called Duplichecker, to search for other sites that might be lifting the same article. I put in the quote from the IBM guy, and found that the entire story had been lifted, verbatim, unattributed to me or the original publication, in a Middle East computer news site as well. Just as I was working up a slow burn, however, I realized that it was affiliated with a sister publication of the original publication. Of course, my original publisher has the right to republish my story all over the world in its own related publications.

As I start 2012, I’m making a New Year’s resolution to launch my own little battle against online plagiarism. I plan to regularly use Duplichecker or something similar (googling “online plagiarism detector” brings up several free ones) to see where pieces of my stories are popping up. I may not be able to stop it, but I can at least try to educate the offenders, one plagiarist at a time.