Post About Blogging Courtesy

Blogging is supposed to be fun, but it's also a lot of work, and it isn't very fun when someone uses your work without giving you credit for the work you've done.

Lily from Shadowkissed.com and I started talking about this last night, and we came to the conclusion that now is a good time to post about this issue. Lily has written a very good post about it, and you can read that over at Shadowkissed.com.

I'd been planning this post for a while, basically ever since I first read Twilight Lexicon's post on blogging courtesy. Stealing content, and not giving credit has been an issue for the Twilight sites for a while, and finally the major sites had had enough, so they wrote posts about it. You can read Twilight Lexicon's here, and Twilight Poison's here.

These are very important posts to read if you own a blog, and I learned a lot by reading them. I know there is a difference between those sites and the Vampire Academy blogs. None of the VA blogs are as big as the most well-known Twilight ones. However, given the fact that Vampire Academy has a good chance of becoming a movie, some of the blogs we have now will grow in size, and others will be added; and I feel it would be great if we could find common ground in this before the blogs grow in size.

I know a lot of the bloggers who make these mistakes, probably do it because they don't know any better. But if you think a little bit about it, you realize how important it is to be able to check your sources. When I post something, I have to know where that information comes from. If you do a report in school, you can't just copy something from a book, and not write down that book as a source.

Also, copying something takes less time than actually writing something yourself. Don't take something that someone else has written, and translate it, and think that makes it okay. Create your own content. If you use pictures that I have found and put up on my blog, give me credit for finding them. If they're available on an official site, and you don't want to give me credit, then grab the pics from the official site. Although, you still should credit that site.

It's important to give credit to those who originally posted something and/or the site where you found the information. It's important to link back to that site, with a working link to the post where you found the information.

Just like Twilight Poison wrote in their post, I don't want this to sound super serious, because Vampire Academy is fun, and blogging about it should be fun! :-) But one way to make it more fun is to be fair.

So if you're a blogger, Vampire Academy or otherwise, or if you regularly post content on internet sites, go read one or all of the posts. It's important reading.