Ripped off by the TimesOnline

The web is a giant echo chamber and sooner or later, somewhere, someone is going to swipe your idea or hijack your hard work.

We all do it to some extent. It's what makes the way of the web.

What's unforgivable is when a reporter working for a publication that used to be a standard-bearer for journalism sinks to the level of some of the more dodgy bottom-feeding blogs.

Last month I interviewed John Hanke, the director in charge of Google Earth and Google Maps, at the Googleplex in Mountain View. I wrote this up when I returned to work and published the story last Friday morning.

Later, when I looked it up on Google, the first thing to pop-up was Mike Harvey's story in the TimesOnline (that's the Times of London). Although Mike credited The Sydney Morning Herald for the story, he provided no link back and then proceeded to rip off almost all of my quotes.

Of his 720 word story, about 500 were directly lifted or paraphrased from my article.

How could he get away with it (until now)?

My story didn't appear correctly indexed on any relevant Google search until much later because somehow a "Windows newline character" crept in to the headline field in what should have been a standard space separating two words. Basically a rogue character.

If you searched for "google earthboss" (all one word), you'd have found the article. But no one uses that search term and, as a result, the article was not picked up and linked to. But Mike's was.

The only reason I'm pursuing this is that Mike was recently caught up in another another case of alleged plagiarism. Later, he told Atlantic.com blogger Megan McArdle that it was an innocent mistake::

As a blogger and technology writer I know the importance of sourcing and linking to sources and rightly feel aggrieved when it does not happen.

There's also a full report of that incident by Judith Townend in journalism.co.uk.

And here's a screen grab of Mike's article as it appeared online with the shaded areas showing the derivative elements.

I've emailed the TimesOnline editor, but as yet to reply.

UPDATE: This afternoon I received a sincere apology from Mike.

He said it was not his publication's policy to link back to original articles but said that as a gesture of goodwill, they would do it.

I told him I accepted his apology. However, he made no mention about my central complaint about the amount of material he lifted, nor does he appear to have cut out any from his piece. But that's about as much as I can do. That, I told him, was an ethical matter between him and his editors.