RyanSchultz.com Reader Survey

This morning it is -34°C in Winnipeg with a strong wind, so with the wind chill it feels like -50°C (which is -58°F to you Americans). Winnipeggers take a sort of perverse pride in the winter weather they can deal with, but even this is a little extreme:

It’s a good day to stay indoors, stay warm, and write a blogpost before I have to bundle up and head off to work! I received some good feedback early this morning from a regular reader of my blog:

Have you ever considered paraphrasing instead of copying/pasting almost an entire article from someone else’s website? I respect your work but in every industry I’ve worked in, this is usually considered rude if not blatant plagiarism. And I never even read the copy/paste anyway (just click the link to the real article) because your copy/paste usually lacks any of the originally formatting (like bold, italics) which removes important context.

My favorite blogs in the past always only copied maybe one or two paragraphs, if any, then advised the reader to go to the original article for the full story, to support the original author of the story.

I know no one’s probably mentioned this to you before but it’s the one thing that’s always bugged me about your blog. I say it with complete respect, it would improve the quality of your blog 1) if you were more respectful to the original authors, and 2) the whole reason I go to your blog is to read your commentary, not just some massive quote from someone else. When one of your post ends up being just that, a massive quote, with only 2 or 3 sentences of actual original thoughts from you, there’s something wrong. IMHO.

This is why Inara’s blog is so good, it’s almost entirely her own thoughts and commentary, with very minimal quoting. She pretty much only quotes when it’s someone official like a Linden, to give added credibility to the information she’s sharing. Other than that, it’s all her own work.

And, I must admit, I probably did over-quote the Hypergrid Business article I quoted in my blogpost about Islandz shutting down. However, I want to make it clear that I always post a link back to the original source whenever I make a quote. (I also quoted a very long comment made to an earlier blogpost, which I felt was important to provide some necessary background to the story.)

But the comment about how much I quote made me realize that I don’t really know how my blog is coming across to my readers. So I have decided to do my first-ever reader survey, to get a better sense of what other readers think about my blog:

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