A disturbing trend I’ve been seeing for a long while now is just getting out of hand. It has to do with a news site copying and pasting the exact words of the article into their post, and not using the semantically correct blockquote tag to make it look like another source cited it. In other words, they copy/paste the exact text to make it look like they said it on their own news site, instead of the source they’re citing.

For examples of this, visit Warp2Search or Neowin.net. Here’s one from Neowin:

“Man’s personal data still on “new” hard drive
Posted by Daniel Fleshbourne on 17 Jul 2004 – 21:12 | 11 comments Forums

YOU’RE PROBABLY wondering why we haven’t called up the chap whose personal data was on a drive we bought from PC World a few weeks back at full price. The answer is this is a can of beans and we’ve only got halfway round the top of said can. It is a jigsaw puzzle, so bear with us because we’ve one of those funny bits which just has blue sky and, er, jigs.

The story so far. We bought, yes bought, a drive from PC World in Tottenham Court Road, found all sorts of data on it, rang the DSG group, then contacted Western Digital, the latter confirming the drive was sold to London distributor CMS. WD is a commendable company – see the tracking slip below.”

Those two paragraphs above are the exact words of an article on The Inquirer. However the author on Neowin present it in such a way that the Inquirer didn’t write it, but Neowin did. Not only are we not getting any thoughts on the matter from Neowin, but it makes the site seem like a glorified RSS feed. While not all news sites do this, it seems to me that some sites are taking the lazy route, and just copy and pasting everything into a news update and leaving it at that.

Am I the only one that is annoyed by this trend?