but please don’t let that put you off – reading your site makes me feel refreshed and positive instead! It’s a beacon of how to do things properly – the writing is always beautifully clear and correct and sources are politely acknowledged.

I think it certainly is a big deal if someone’s nicked your photo – would have been easy enough to ask, wouldn’t it. Or just make more effort to take her own photo. The fact that it was taken in your front room makes it worse somehow, doesn’t it! Has she popped round and made herself a cup of tea in your kitchen too?!

Seeing your own work on someone else’s page is very odd. And increasingly common, sadly.

Trying to add some more pages soon. Thanks for supporting this website – hope you’ll continue to visit.

If I were feeling generous and less irritated it could be seen as … that he’s tried to do the right thing by including links further down the page to the page with the text he quoted. But I know that no one will connect the two. They probably won’t even visit the pages of mine he links to, and if they do, only for a second.

Maybe what I see as obvious and straightforward, isn’t.

All that was needed was to put quotation marks or to indent the paragraphs and then put ‘-from [link to the page]’ directly under the quote. To make sure it stays attached to its ‘owner’ (me) – as much as that’s ever possible on the web …

There are no doubt a range of views out there, from people who know exactly why I’m bothered by this, to people who think I’m making a fuss about nothing.

Anyway, involved in other things in the ‘real world’ just now, off back to them.

The main issue here is that the copied text isn’t just some factual thing I copied or cobbled together from Wikipedia, it’s a personal piece – clearly, as it includes the word ‘I’. So who is ‘I’ on his page? It’s not me, is it.

It does raise more general issues I’ve thought about often and which I’m sure many others have who put creative work on the web. Which is why I’ve written about it on here rather than merely commenting on the page in question.

There is a general attitude change – maybe many changes – which tend to lead me to the belief that I need to change my approach too. I shouldn’t put so much effort into trying to get things ‘just right’ – it’s only on the web, so it’s essentially ephemeral, of less value, easily ’stolen’. The shared values of the web which were understood years ago are gone. The lack of generosity in crediting sources is perhaps, to me, the most obvious change.