Tuesday, Mar. 21 2006

Engadget and Unethical Blogging

Posted by Tiago

And to finish the night, a controversial subject regarding Engadget, DAPreview, and what happens when someone doesn’t mention the source right, or does other bad things.

For more information, read Engadget: Busted for Unethical Blogging at DAPreview.net.

The resume of the whole confusion:

- DaPreview.net writes an original article, with an original photo shot by them at CeBIT. The post was about a Nainworks product at CeBIT, and the photo was watermarked with “dapreview.net”

- A post at Engadget pops up, talking about the same product and has the image and link to dapreview.net- everything is OK. (see original)

- A revised articled pops up a few moments later, but this time it has no link to dapreview (linking to mobilemag.com instead) and the watermark of the image is chopped out. (see revised)

- DaPreview staff gets mad and makes a post about it. Read it here

- Engadget staff replies, says it was a mistake (~~chopping a watermark with a website address happens by accident, of course~~), and also says sorry. The posted is edited again and right now, the image with the watermark is there, and so is the link to dapreview - see the post now

- The post in DaPreview about Engadget has more stories about similar actions like this happening before.

In the meanwhile, revolution begins.

- At Engadget, users start to comment… like this.

- This story about Engadget: Busted for Unethical Blogging pops up at digg.com - It’s probably on the front page by now

- A Wikipedia user adds “Plagiarism” section in the Engadget wiki

Update1:

- HardOPC writes a post about it, and so does DesignTechnica.

- Blog Herald and andruedwards also talk about it.

Update2:

- ProBlogger heard about the news at digg.com

- TechnoSailor also comments this issue

Update3:

- OhGizmo has a long post it and other related issues

Unrelated: Some weeks before this cruel event, Applexnet.com published an article - Engadget, and TUAW The Biggest Apple Rumor Websites? - nice reading.

That’s all for now.

A similar thing happened to me some time ago, on my other blog - The Gadgets Weblog.

In December 2005, I recorded some videos with the N90 (the cellphone was “hot” at the moment), made the post about it, and submitted tips to gizmodo, engadget, i4u and others. All ignored except i4u, who published the article - here.

To my surprise, I see that my story about the videos of the N90 pops up at Gizmodo too, but it has no link to the original source (me), only to i4u. Almost all the other blogs that follow Gizmodo linked to i4u or Gizmodo itself, and not for me…

And to think that I sent a tip to Gizmodo about the videos one day before i4u publishing the article, and they ignored it (or had so many tips that didn’t read it) and picked another site to refer to.

Ironic?

I didn’t care much because the visitors had to come for my blog to watch the videos, so I did get the deserved traffic. Just goes to show why mentioning the source is important.

Via DaPreview

Technorati Tags engadget, blogging, ethics

Filed under: Breaking News, Internet

4 Responses

Ryan Block

March 21st, 2006 at 1:18 am
1

You must not have read our replies (if you did, you certainly did not cite them or characterize them the way they were written) but I’ve plainly apologized, explained, and taken responsibility for what occurred. Mistakes happen; coordinating a blog with a hundreds large OPML, hundreds of tips and hundreds of links daily, and a regularly growing staff is more difficult than you might think, and errors do occasionally occur (such as in this instance when I wrongly misattributed a source). Thanks for understanding.

Best, Ryan
Tiago

March 21st, 2006 at 1:43 am
2

I actually did read your replies, but it’s hard to understand why would someone just rip off the watermark and so on.

It’s all explained now…
Paul

March 21st, 2006 at 1:47 am
3

Hi Ryan, Paul here. I own this site and a few others and can understand that mistakes happen when juggling massive amounts of data on a constant basis.

Tiago, the editor here wrote this post as more or less a timeline of how the whole situation unfolded, gave his opinion based on other personal experiences and left it up to the reader to make up their own mind if they chose to follow and read all the links.

At least, that’s how I see it. If I thought he was out of line I would have called him on it.

Thanks for dropping by and adding your input.

Sincerely,

Paul Short
Bloglogic.net
Austin Vaughan

March 26th, 2006 at 11:49 am
4

Austin here, from DAPreview.net

To clarify, the issue is not relevent with Engadget and ALL blogs, just some - including DAPreview. Peter and Ryan have a personal problem with us dating back to 2004, as I explained in the article.

So, do you buy their response?

“Ooops, we didn’t really mean to do that, it was all an accident.”

OK, so, they took the time to go back and edit an article that was already published, from another author. They took the time to rewrite the credit, removing all reference to DAPreview. They took the time to edit the picture and repost it, cutting out the DAPreview logo. They did all this - for no apparent reason - and without checking a single fact?

Keep in mind, out of the 100+ items that they credited to us before August 2005, only a handful of our images were ever watermarked. The few that were, had been originals of ours taken at CES or CeBIT… never once have we watermarked somebody’s else’s photo.

Their explanation is ridiclous, but what else can they say? We didn’t expect them to admit anything.

Anyway… we had to call them out, it’s done, and we’re moving on.

Thanks for bringing this issue to light on your blog.

Regards,
Austin