Microsoft case of using other’s Blogs

Dear prof. Gatarski,
Using the last chance of publishing important lesson to our MBA group I’d like to recommend additional reading on cioinsight.com, how big companies are using other’s blogs to improve own businesses and why is important for big enterprises to develop blogging
trend by private persons.
Before this reading I could not understand, why private persons are blogging – now it is clear!
Please post the my recommendation on your AEDBE blog.
Link to article:
http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,2023008,00.asp?kc=COCIOEMLP100306CMS1
Regards from Cracow,
e-grasshopper
Virtual Life [ <- Link to e-grasshopper's blog added by the prof. ]

Extended time for delayed students

If I, as a business consultant, would recognize that I might miss an important deadline I feel it is very important for those involved to get an early warning. Hence, I would explain to, for example my customer, that I might be delayed and submit an apology as well as an explanation. In worst case they would throw me out and sue me. In best case they would understand and we could solve the situation together in the best interest of all parties involved.

Today the MBA office informed me that "due to lots of obligations and commitments in their professional live not every students met the requirements and did not finish the blogs". I was also asked to extend the deadline. There was at least an explanation, though not a very early warning.

I do understand that many of you have lots of things to do - we all have. But I am prepared to let you work with the assignment until October 31, 2006. Note! This means you have to start blogging right now (and according to the instructions also inform me that you have started).

As a courtesy to those who started in time I will grade their assignment well before the new deadline. As well as take into consideration that they fulfilled their part of our agreement.

Cheers and good luck.

Blog content, copyrights and credits

This post is motivated by some recent unfoldings in a couple of the student's blogs. As I previously posted julia24pl published, without any credits, content from another blog. When I found that out I sent an e-mail to Fredrik Wackå (the original author who I happen to know). My mail and the response from Fredrik is found below (with his permission).

I hope there are a number of lessons to be learned here. I also assume that no student was trying to cheat me or the academic world. Hopefully the reasons was ignorance and that the students are unaccustomed to the bloggosphere culture and copyright issues.


From: Richard Gatarski
Sent: September 30, 2006 13:03
To: fredrik@wpr.se
Subject: Gatarski found that your content has been stolen

Hi Fredrik,

I thought the following might interest you from a "blogs in management teaching" perspective and it seems you got personally involved without knowing so :-)

Late May this year I hade a couple of lectures in "E-business management" for a class of Polish MBA students. I gave them the assignment to start a blog, asap, and use it as a way to document their findings from a self selected business problems where digital tools could be useful. See http://aedbe.blogspot.com/

After a couple of months (the students also have full time jobs) about 25 of them had started blogs. Generally they have done a range of really good assignments to just tentative trying-blogging-out.

But, here comes to point. After the deadline (September 24) two students mailed me to announce their blogs. The first one obviously did a post (only one ) that was just a copy+paste from another blog. I blogged about that in the "class blog", see http://aedbe.blogspot.com/2006/09/beware-of-copyrights.html. (telling I found it, warned about copyright, and wanted a comment from the studens).

And late yesterday I got the mail below from another student. As I browsed throught the postings a recognized one (http://julia24pl.blogspot.com/2006/09/from-business-perspective-there-are.html) IT WAS YOUR "Why blogs for business?" http://www.corporateblogging.info/basics/why/
Another posting (http://julia24pl.blogspot.com/2006/09/from-business-perspective-there-are.html) is a rip-off from the Blog Business Summit Archives (http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2006/08/companies_adopt.htm).

I think there are some lessons to be learned here. If you have the time and interest to comment
I would surely appreciate that. After all, this is a way to increase the understanding of blogging
and social media among business managers.

Cheers,

/richard



From: Fredrik Wackå
Sent: October 1, 2006 18:46
To: 'Richard Gatarski
Subject: SV: Gatarski found that your content has been stolen

Hi Richard (and others)!

I’m not surprised because it is a common mistake.

Not knowing anything about the thoughts about this from the publisher, I think we can view this from a couple of different perspectives.

1. “It’s just for my own records, I don’t have to be so detailed with sources”
This is a thought I’ve heard of and it makes sense. But it misses the important part of bloggers carefully studying their visitor statistics and referrers. Unless the blog is behind firewalls, we should always act as if it will be read by complete outsiders.

2. “I want it to look like this is my own content”
Bad idea, not only from a copyright perspective. Out there in the blogosphere we’re judged by what we write AND what we link to. There’s a message in the linking and a message that is equally important as the content. So even if we disregard the risk of content theft being discovered, I’d say that the publisher hurts himself by not linking to the source(s).

3. “Everything is free on the Net anyway”
Well, obviously it isn’t. Not even in the blogosphere everything is free. Sure – almost all bloggers want to be cited. Many actually say “Here’s my stuff. Do what you want.” But they say one sentence more: “As long as you link to me”. This is the Creative Commons which you have to understand to figure out what’s best practice in blogs.

So, no bad feelings on my side J
A hopefully interesting learning experience for the publisher.

Best
/Fredrik