Posted by Suzanne McMinn @ 8:03 am | Permalink
Daily Farmhouse Journal
Exciting Update (8/18): The first Fish Creek House blog I found, the one at http:// - fishcreekhouse - .blogspot - .com went to “invited users” only but now if you go there, this message appears: “Sorry, the blog at fishcreekhouse.blogspot.com has been removed.” PERFECT! The blog at the homesteadblogger site is also deleted! She has at least two other blogs that we know about-one at http:// - etchedbystone - .wordpress - .com and at http:// fvclassic - .wordpress - .com and these two blogs appear to still exist but they are both marked as “protected” and can’t be read by the public. I’ll continue to monitor the status of these two blogs and search for any new blogs this plagiarist may attempt to start up. Thank YOU for all of your help!!!!
8/17 Updates:
And this! Unbelievable! The plagiarized post that was stolen from me and Farmgirl Fare now appears here on Blogowogo for people to vote on what a great post it is!!
Was just notified of this: Fish Creek Watch.
Next day update: At least two of her blogs are more or less shut down in that they are now invite-only, which means she’s still passing off other people’s work as her own to her invited users and may at any time open the blogs up again (when she thinks the heat’s off) and she can go back to stealing-as-usual. She’s still posting openly at her homestead blogger site (one of her 5000 plagiarized blogs). It’s http:// - homesteadblogger - .com/ - fishcreekhouse. Note that I’m taking out all the direct links to her sites in this post so that I don’t help her Google ranking-just take out the spaces and dashes to get there. You can totally call up the Fish Creek House owners if you want. Owners’ names: Cindy and Dan Busarow. Here’s all the contact info, which she has posted on her bed & breakfast website: Fish Creek House B&B, 5913 State Hwy. 41, Whitehall, MT 59759, 406.287.2181, 406.287.3209 fax. Or email her at info (at) fishcreekhouse.com. Also, she goes by “horsewoman” (thank you, Kim W!) when she comments on homesteadblogger blogs. If you are a member of homesteadblogger, please consider asking them to remove her? I’ve written them, but I’m not a member. Notes from members might carry more weight. She steals every single day from people all over the internet. (Almost hard to wrap your mind around, huh?) You can tell them that the current post (August 15) on her homesteadblogger site is shamelessly copied from Green Living Online and the true author is Shelagh McNally. (Thanks for finding that one, Lori!)
Oh, and in the post that contained parts of two posts stolen from me? The part of her post that wasn’t stolen from me, I have discovered, was stolen from Farmgirl Fare.
The Original 8/16 Post:
I was stunned to be notified of this blog- http:// - fishcreekhouse - .blogspot - .com/ and the plagiarism of my posts. People plagiarize blog posts?! It’s unbelievable, but worse, to me, is that part of the plagiarism comes from a deeply personal and emotional post on my blog, A Small Treatise on Happiness. Part of their plagiarism also comes from this post, Not Over It Yet.
The plagiarism appears here- http:// - fishcreekhouse. - blogspot - .com/ -in the third section down, titled The Joys of the Animal Kingdom, and was posted yesterday. The text of the plagiarized post is as follows (I copied this directly from their blog, typos included):
“When I was a kid we watched “Wild Kingdom” every week on TV .. I want to say that it was on on Sunday nights, maybe at six o’clock, right before the Walt Disney hour. At least that’s how I remember it. Mutual of Omaha sponsored the show. I had no iclue what Mutual of Omaha was, but to this day I can still remember their 800 number.
We don’t get the local channels though we do get cable and RFD… Either way, I look out a window and realize we live in Wild Kingdom.
feel like I’m five years old when I see a deer. There’s something so romantic about deer. Maybe it’s all that poetic imagery that goes with them–knights and kings and woodsmen. Or maybe it’s that they’re just plain gorgeous, and that they know how to play hard to get.
It’s certainly not that they’re scarce. Whether it’s the dry weather or increasing population or some combination of factors, they’re everywhere , and not just at dusk when they normally come out to feed, but all day. Leaping across the road in front of my car, grazing in the meadow bottoms, frolicking along the the creek–sometimes dozens at a time.
his is my life, not anyone else’s idea of what my life should be. I delight in happening upon sheep, fording rivers in a 4WD I never would have imagined I’d need, watching snow fall over the hills, and I love, absolutely love, finding chickens in the road. I get excited about things like buying muck boots as they’re a saving grace. I love most things about my life, these days, a statement which I could ‘nt have honestly made in the past. And that, I believe, is what life should be like and why I wouldn’t take back one step it took to get here since I know it’s part of G-d’s journey . It is true that nothing worth having comes easy, and possibly more true of happiness than anything else.
But it’s also true that it’s worth having.
But now it’s time to get back to innkeeping chores. Yes, life here is the way of the unexpected I looked up the word unexpected in my thesaurus earlier, and this is what it said: surprising, unforeseen, sudden, stunning, eye-opening, astonishing, astounding, amazing, breathtaking. Yes, that was today. And pretty much every day here. We are all constantly surrounded by the unexpected-if we just slow down long enough to notice.
And for me, happiness is cows in the road, horses in the barn and everything that means. What about you? What does happiness mean to you?”
If you look at my original posts, A Small Treatise on Happiness and Not Over It Yet, it’s outrageous. And, I have to admit, because the plagiarism comes from such a personal and emotional post, it’s hurtful. (If they want to steal my words, maybe they could also steal the pain I went through in order to come to a place in my life where I wrote that post.) But what do you do?
(Please see today’s regular post below with Princess’s pics!)
8/16 Updates: Someone notified me that they googled some phrases from the Fish Creek House site and discovered plagiarism of other blogs on the site, too. For example, googling this: “do an I dream of Jeanie folded arm wink” shows that it is in a post stolen from this site. I suspected as I looked through the site that some posts about cows were at least partially ripped off from Pioneer Woman, but I’m not positive. Hey, at least I’m in good company.
Another example, she has also ripped off this site. Wow…..
And more!!!
There’s a post here- http:// - fishcreekhouse - .blogspot - .com/2008_07_01_archive.html -that appears to be stolen from this blog.
More Updates:
Well, thanks for letting me know that the blog has now been closed and made invitation-only! To hide all the plagiarism? The plagiarized blog is part of the Fish Creek House Bed & Breakfast website, by the way- http:// - www.fishcreekhouse - .com. So she’s using all of these plagiarized posts on a blog that is a promotional tool for her business. Making money off of other people’s stolen work. I’ve reported her to 5 Minutes for Mom, a network her blog is associated with, and to Blogger.
Another example just sent to me: “whenever I see two lonely black bananas on the counter, I just know. It’s banana bread time” This come from a post the Fish Creek House blogger stole from this blogger.
The Fish Creek House website shows they have another blog here- http:// - etchedbystone - .wordpress - .com. I haven’t had a chance to search through this one yet to see if it contains stolen material, too, but how much you wanna bet?
