Late in August I saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.
It’s very interesting because Stephen M. Kosslyn has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010).
The article described three different studies. On September 1st in a post on Rules Commonly Broken I discussed the first one, which examined 140 presentations to see if they violated any of a set of 137 rules covering communication principles. On September 2nd in a post on a Survey of Common Flaws and Annoyances I discussed the second one. On September 3rd in a post on Do People Know and Understand What They’re Doing I discussed the third one.
When I looked on Google I was surprised to find that all three of my posts has been parroted - the entire text had been copied and reposted on other TypePad blogs. My first post had appeared on Buckvvidella’s Blog, Dorsey Emerson’s Blog, and Nathaneal Foster 21’s Blog. My second post had shown up on Delrobles 86’s Blog, Hong Fernandez 19’s Blog, Peckalberto50’s Blog, and Stevens Kieth’s Blog. So far my third post only was on Riederuuin’s Blog. Those reposts did provide a link to my posts, but they did not contain links back to the original article that I had discussed.
I’m not amused by being copied wholesale, which is known as having your content scraped. You can get information either from the horse’s mouth, or out of the other end. Why would you choose the rear end? (The horse came from Wikimedia Commons).
UPDATE September 7, 2012
I was curious if this bait post also would be scraped. Today it showed up on a blog with the curious name of Platonic Best Friend Definition.
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