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Leaders Who Are Followers

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CLEVELAND (Rixstep) — Information on the Internet today: bloggers write blog pieces to exchange opinions; social media sites like Twitter post small pieces to exchange links to news as it's breaking; the mainstream media - the 'old media' - continue to serve up state-subsidised filtered (distorted) truth.

Then one has the 'news aggregator' sites'. They literally steal their content from other sites, reword it a bit, publish it without attribution, then kick back and count the ad revenues pouring in.

They're the lowest of the low along with the spammers.

Cleveland Leader

One such news aggregator site that popped up on the radar the other days is Cleveland Leader. That's supposed to be a news site. But there are no news reporters there. Only a few lowlifes who add content by literally doing the good old 'copypasta', then changing a few words, then taking credit for it all.

Check their byline - it says 'Leader Staff'. Click the link. It leads to a page with no content.

In the early hours of a morning not too far into the past, staff at Rixstep were headed home, when out of the blue there came a new post at Flashback. It was a link to a Swedish language piece from Iceland - the 'Iceland Blog'. Kristinn Hrafnsson had been on the telly the night before and told the harrowing story of how the FBI came to Iceland in August 2011 and started walking around as if they owned the place - only to get firmly booted out by the Home Secretary.

Big news. Off with the coats, back to the terminals, translate the piece as fast as possible and get it out there.

You can see the results here.

http://rixstep.com/1/20130131,00.shtml

The quotes were of particular interest and translated with the greatest care. They were something a Swede fluent in Icelandic picked up off the telly. One of the words the blogger used to describe the actions of the FBI was 'fräckt'. You can get an idea of the consternation by checking the following link.

http://tyda.se/search?form=1&w=fräckt

The customary translation for 'fräckt' is 'cheeky', but 'cheeky' implies a lighthearted frivolity not found in the actions of the FBI. Someone suggested 'impudent' as that word had the exact right ring, but unfortunately it set the entire block quote out of whack. 'Presumptuous', someone suggested. 'Presumptuous' worked.

So it went with other sections as well. Not exactly mainstream news site lingo - but then again it's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be a bit looser, informal, and hopefully cool.

Imagine then the shock and surprise when the exact same article turned up in Ohio only a few hours later. The maggots at the 'Leader' were evidently following the Twitter feed of a somewhat known whistleblower organisation where the Rixstep piece was first picked up.

The quotes were identical. The only source for the quotes was from the 'Iceland Blog'. The odds of hitting the exact same translation for 'fräckt' were... No matter: the quotes were identical.

Retreat!

A flurry of tweets and messages to the Ohio news site and their upstream providers ensued. Cleveland Leader were no 'legit' news site as evidenced already by their ICANN registration data.

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrant:
Domains By Proxy, LLC

They'd also nicked a map from another site, leading a commenter to joke 'what kindergarten did you get that map from?'

Today's world means a lot of information-sharing. That's fine. What is not fine is stealing from others and trying to give the impression one's done the work oneself, as with the 'Leader'.

We called it a night at last, only to return in the afternoon to witness the following.

Now suddenly Google Translate's going to be the source of the quotes - and it's all attributed! Better that perhaps than refer back to the site who found them out and who may very well expose them for what they are.

But look at (yea enjoy) the translation - which the doofuses didn't have the wherewithal to even fix. Suddenly it's not 'impudent' or 'presumptuous' to prance onto Icelandic soil - it's incredibly cool!

So goes it for lowlifes. They deserve far worse.

OK you Leader maggots: you get to wait outside the iron doors of the Hall of Monkeys. You don't even get to come in and scrub the floors for a bowl of cold gruel. You get to stay right where you are until you apologise to all the hard-working people you've ripped off and until you come up with one news story of your own.

Suffer.