Whose Web Page Is It Anyhow?

Have you ever wondered whether anyone else is using your website material for their own purposes? Or whether your web writer(s) have used any verbiage from someone else’s web page? With all of the information available on the Internet and the millions of web pages available for public view, finding violations of copyright and enforcing them may be difficult.

From time to time, I have found plagiarism on the Internet and I’m sure that there are many undiscovered examples. Last year, I decided to compare the website content that I developed for a previous employer to other web pages. I was surprised when I found that a page on another company’s website was exactly the same as mine with one exception. I mentioned the name of my employer, and the other company substituted the word, “we” for a company name.

You, too, can find out whether your web content has been copied. Just go the http://www.copyscape.com/ and enter the url of any web page that you want to compare. This is the free version and it will return a limited number of similar pages but includes those that are most similar or even identical.

If you do find another web page that is suspiciously like yours, the date of publication on the web becomes important. You can find out approximately when pages were uploaded or changed at the Internet Wayback Machine at www.archive.org/index.php. After you enter the url of the page(s) involved, you will be given the dates that changes were made to that page.

As you can see, it’s easy to use material from one page on another, but it’s also easy to get caught.

Not Just Another Business Blog

Why another business blog? As Calvin Coolidge said, “… the chief business of the American people is business.” Although this observation dates back to 1925, I believe that it is still valid today. As a business owner, an employee, and a consumer, I know that business touches every aspect of our lives. And in this blog, I would like to address many of the themes that are of major concerns to all of these groups: accounting and finance, sales and marketing, information technology and the Internet, risk management, ethics, leadership, performance management, and human resources.

For companies to prosper, they need to continually monitor and respond to these issues and the rapidly changing regulatory, technological and fiscal climates. And so much material, including an abundance of blogs, has been and is being written for businesses.

I would like to distinguish this blog from many others by dealing with some topics that I consider “sidelights” – topics largely ignored in other blogs and in business articles — as well as with the larger issues. Also, because no one can possibly be an expert in everything, I would like to have other writers, specialists in their respective fields, contribute articles.

I hope that you will agree that this is “not just another business blog.”

For those of you who may be considering blogging yourselves, I would highly recommend blogging for Business by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos. I would also like to thank www.marketingsherpa.com for introducing me to this book.