My wife’s website (that we built):

The ripoff:

While the main difference is that the copy is of lesser quality (yes, I’m biased, but still)… if you’re not seeing the plagiarism, the main points are:

• Colored background with rounded content corners
• Dog with drop shadow laying on the top right corner
• Two-tone menu with a thin border underneath
• Content: text on the “about” page – sentences are the same in many cases with a single word “changed”
• Content: classes are almost identical, just slightly different prices

To give an example of some of the text duplication, read the following…

Example 1

TANDEM: “Hi, I’m Julie Lyle, the owner of Tandem. I have had a passion for all animals, and specifically dogs, since I was very young.”

RHODES: “Hello, my name is Jennifer Rhodes-Bingham. This all started when I was eight years old.”

Example 2

TANDEM: “My immediate family includes husband, Nathan, owner of the The U.P. Web Maestro; step-children: Josh (16), Joey (15), and Kari (13); son Raymond (3), German Shepherd Dog/Doberman mix Shelby (10), Labrador Retriever Ramsey (4) & Doberman Pinscher Duncan (1).”

RHODES: “My immediate family consists of my husband Adam, and my four dogs. I have two Greyhounds Beth Ann (7) and Foxy (3), a Golden Retriever Ace (5), and my Italian Greyhound Kylie (5).”

Looking at the code behind the pages, there are further “similarities”… for example, the keyword meta tag…

TANDEM: Dog Training, Marquette Dog Training, Puppy Classes, Dog Training Classes, Obedience, Dog Behavior, Negaunee, Michigan, Daycare, Dog Day Care, Doggie Daycare

RHODES: Dog Training, Puppy Classes, Dog Training Classes, Obedience, Dog Behavior, Negaunee, Michigan, Rhodes to Obedience, On the Rhodes to Obedience, Rhodes, Jennifer Rhodes, Jennifer Rhodes-Bingham, Jennifer Rhodes Bingham

Changing the order of things isn’t creating, it’s copying.

I can’t be sure whether this was something done entirely by the “designer” or if it was also the website owner, but if it was the owner, the designer has a responsibility in cases like this. Unless specifically stated otherwise, when content is created and put on the Web, it is the copyrighted intellectual property of the publisher. When I contacted the designer of the On The Rhodes to Obedience website, Heather Pringle, this was her response…

“I’m not sure what you are talking about.  She has a dog obedience class.  She told me what pages she absolutely wanted on the site so that is what I had to design around.  I had 2 designs for her and this is the one she choose.  I do know that Tandem is another dog training school which is similar to Rhodes to Obedience.  It is a business website so there are going to be similarities between two websites of the same business.  All the code and logo design are original and the pictures are property of the site owner and are used with her permission.”

…which doesn’t quite address the point. It’s not specific images that were copied, but the design and content. Not much different than handing in a term paper in college that you copied from your roommate. While on one hand this sort of thing is annoying, imitation is supposedly the sincerest form of flattery.

Some of the thinking behind this is that the less a company gets in the way of the consumer as far as what they need, the more they will appreciate the company and give it business. Besides, it’s the consumer’s data, why not let them have it? As Brian Fitzpatrick, lead of this project said “…if you’re using a Google product now and you decide to go somewhere else, the easier we make it to leave and take your data with you, the more likely you are to come back and use something we come out with in the future.” A major problem they have remaining, though, is how to make it easy to download large amounts of data over networks whose speeds don’t match the ever increasing storage sizes for online services, an ever increasing problem as people are obtaining more and more software products online.

NASA may or may not be enlisting the help of ET for their internet work

This is a bit of old news but still interesting nonetheless. NASA is developing an interplanetary internet framework that would allow faster communication between earth and other planets, which is necessary because the current system is so slow. The agency is eyeing Mars in particular because the current goal seems to be to get a manned mission to Mars. In order to have better communication between Earth and Mars, more satellites will need to be put into orbit around Mars. Also, NASA is developing a new internet protocol called Delay Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to allow them to send data between computers that could get lost easily. There’s an excellent article on discovery.com about this new technology, as well as howstuffworks.com

“NASA could put a man on the moon but didn’t have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission. In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.” (from toptechnews.com)

This is unfortunate on many fronts for NASA. Beyond just making them look a tad bit incompetent, it adds much fuel to the conspiracy fire that we never actually landed on the moon in the firstplace. Though NASA had denied for years that the moon landing was staged, the official footage will now indeed be a Hollywood creation.

“The studio wizards who restored ‘Casablanca’ are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.”

I won’t get into the conspiracy here, but if you’re curious you can run off in this direction. Without the original footage available, NASA loses one of the main arguments against the conspiracy folks. Definitely not their shining moment.

Anyway, back to backing up. You should do it. If you’re not sure how to manually make backups, you may want to subscribe to one of the online services. Here’s a link to information and options to get you started:

• Windows XP Backup Made Easy
  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/bott_03july14.mspx
• Windows Backup and Restore Center
  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/backup.aspx
• Mozy – Online Backup
  http://www.mozy.com
• Carbonite – Online Backup
  http://www.carbonite.com

In December of 2008, Google introduced their contribution to the browser wars, Google Chrome. There’s also been a push for several years now toward online versions of the desktop applications you’re used to using every day when you’re not surfing the Web. One of the more successful has been Google Docs.

One of the biggest objections I’ve personally had against moving to an online platform for every day office work, has been the idea of storing documents on Google’s servers rather than my own machine. This actually has several advantages as well as disadvantages. It would protect my documents against my hardware being destroyed or stolen, make upgrading my hardware easier, and make it easier to access things from anywhere I happened to be working. However, there’s always the chance that I wouldn’t have an Internet connection (either from home or away) and I’m not convinced yet that my documents would be as or more safe and secure on someone else’s server.

What’s making things really interesting now, is that Google is looking to create the first widely used Web based operating system, to compete with Windows and the Apple OS.

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.” – Google’s blog post on July 7th

The obvious advantage in this for Google is that the more time people spend online, the more often they’ll be searching for things. So with a suite of applications, a Web browser, and now an operating system, Google is lining up to create the sort of monopoly previously enjoyed mostly by Microsoft.

Ignoring the negatives, there’s plenty to be excited about in a centralized data system if it can be made to be reliable, secure and accessible from anywhere. Website design was given a boost with XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets, and the concept of separating the “style” of a page from the “content” of the page. It allowed a more powerful approach to creating pages, and made updating and editing a much easier and quicker task. If we can separate computers from software in the same way, we might see the same type of boost in productivity.

In any case, the next few years will be interesting to watch.