Tuesday, October 23, 2007

A Baffling Incoming Link with No Actual Link! PLAGIARISM!

I've been reading of errors occurring within the FeedBurner service that is used by so many bloggers and websites as a whole. The most notable of these is a huge hit count on a hacky sack site that normally receives a very minimal number of hits. Then I checked my FeedBurner dashboard and found something interesting as well!

I had one incoming link (a click from a different websites that has a direct link to my own blog) that came from an absolutely huge site known The Wall Street Journal. This caught my attention immediately.

The blog post that had this incoming link was about a possible collapse of the music industry and can be found here.

Several ideas started running through my head:

1. Why would anyone at The Wall Street Journal read or care what I have to say?

2. What did they like about me so much for them to even mention my blog?

3. This is absolutely amazing but I'm going to be a little disappointed if this is a fluke.

So I set out to try to find answers to these questions. What did I find? Nothing. I went to the supposed page that my incoming link came from and I found that my blog, name and topic for that post had no link point anywhere. I checked the blog section, articles of note and just about anything that I could think of and found nothing.

So what happened here? Does anyone have any clue? Was this an error on FeedBurner's part? Is The Wall Street Journal utilizing other blogs without providing links? If so, we might have an issue of plagiarism on our hands!

If anyone has any idea or possible speculation as to how and/or why this happened let me know. I would love to hear it!

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Have a great day!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One *THEORETICAL* possibility - someone did a mash-up of several pages using JavaScript, of which yours and WSJ were two of them. When the clicked a link to your page, the domain from which the main page was initially loaded (theoretically WSJ) was reported as the referrer.

A way-out theory, but probably far more realistic than WSJ quoting your blog.

BTW: you mention plagiarism but you don't mention that they took any text from your site. So where's the plagiarism?