This couldn’t be more funny. What a good laugh.
But be educated!
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joey says
I needed this…Thanks
Tim Owens says
I love The Oatmeal
I love 8bit
That being said it’s probably not a good idea to take the entire content of his post and paste it here, negating the need for anyone to ever click through. 🙂
John Saddington says
tim,
this is an accepted web journalistic practice. he still gets credit and his link is above.
Tim Owens says
I respectfully disagree. An excerpt with a link to someone’s blog that has the full post is accepted web journalistic practice. Taking the entire content, sticking your ads in and around it, and including a small link to the actual post is not.
Related: http://waxy.org/2009/04/all_things_digital_and_transparency_in_online_journalism/
But it’s not my battle, just offering up an opinion. If The Oatmeal is cool with it I’m cool with it.
John Saddington says
cool that’s just one perspective, and it references COPY which is very different than media. don’t forget that. “content” encapsulates those different elements but doesn’t inform all of them the same.
our goal is to highlight the sources so that YOU can go subscribe to them directly. we help people become aware of neat things like this.
ultimately the oatmeal will be fine with it because we gave them traffic and new readers.
and if you have a problem, feel free to unsubscribe and ban us from your sites that you visit. doesn’t bother me at all if you feel like (and capable of) finding all the “source” material out there…
i simply can’t remember the last time i “found” anything unique that someone didn’t blog about or tell me about.
Tim Owens says
John,
I certainly hope I haven’t offended you and if I’m derailing the post feel free to e-mail me offline. I think it’s an important discussion only because a lot of us that follow the 8bit network of sites are content creators. If the goal is to “highlight” content I’m down 100%. We just seem to disagree on how much “highlighting” there was here as opposed to straight copy. The comment lower down here that believes you created this would seem to be a good indicator that the source wasn’t exactly clear here.
John Saddington says
hah!
yeah. that’s a bit discouraging… we certainly didn’t create it! i’ll respond to andy.
wasn’t offended. i’m not easily offended at all. i’m just a bit too busy to worry about things like this that are so grey in execution.
😉
thanks for keeping it striaght though! glad people can read this and get some good perspective!
Trevor Taylor says
This really helps me; I am a better grammar educated person.
PhillipGibb says
ha ha ha,
ever heard that audio clip; it must be over 20yrs old, where this guys reads a piece from Shakespeare – verbalizing each punctuation mark.
Andy R says
You did a great job without using a lot of technical speak. One thing I see a lot in my audio transcription business is people wanting to use a semicolon in place of an em dash–for summation or amplification at the end of a sentence. Or, they omit the semicolon altogether and use periods. I think this article will help them understand the difference. Thx.
John Saddington says
andy,
just to be clear, we didn’t create these… the Oatmeal did!
Blane Young says
This was really helpful!
And this was my favorite line:
“I am pretty sure bologna is made out of cow elbows”
I wish my High School English Teachers had used stuff like this…