The blogosphere has had some basic fairness rules in place for many years. One is if you take an exclusive story from a blog, you link back. So you’d think that major blogs would follow that, even more so when run by major media companies…but you’d be wrong.

We broke the story this week about the Australian Prime Minister joining Twitter. When I say broke, we were the first news site OR blog to run the story. About 80-90 minutes after our post went up, ZDNet Australia ran the same story with identical talking points. Not out and out plagiarism, but the similarities were very strong. The next outlet to run with it was 2 hours later again. When I put the post up, I’d manually linked to the post on Twitter because I thought it might be of interest as well.

I don’t begrudge the fact that ZDNet lifted the story at all, or even basically copied the talking points with a slight re-write. But I do take great umbrage with the fact that they didn’t attribute it. I Twittered my disgust on Tuesday, and thought really nothing more about it until today, when I receive a tweet from ZDNet News Editor Renai LeMay asking for details. I sent him my concerns, and this is the response I got.

Firstly let me say that I completely understand your concerns. Thanks for your email, and I hope everything is well at the Inquisitr.

I respect what the Inquisitr is doing as an independent Australian media organisation, and what you are personally doing as a leading light of new media internationally and in this country.

The article you were referring to was written by Alex Serpo, one of our in-house journalists, and edited by myself.

Firstly, let me say that I think this email exchange illustrates the fact that there are different points of view on this sort of issue from different media organisations.

When a story breaks elsewhere, that ZDNet.com.au wants to have on its site, we attempt to find primary sources (eg, a press release, or calling people up for info), and write our own article.

We don’t usually refer to or use material from other media organisations as we have no way to verify whether their information is correct (and they may have left something out).

Given we are part of CBS, and our articles are re-published worldwide, for us to take any other approach would be inappropriate.

We don’t generally link back to whoever has broken a story first. I am aware that this is a standard technique in the blogosphere, but we don’t follow it here as per current editorial guidelines.

The bolding is mine, but it’s the key line. We also WERE the primary source.

And then he takes the cowards defense after all but fessing up to the fact they’d lifted the story. I’d note at this point that 2 hours after they posted, news.com.au in their article noted that they were unable to confirm the story with the Prime Ministers office or ANY OTHER PLACE; so ZDNet magically got a better source than Australia’s largest media organization? The story wasn’t on either the KevinPM site or the official PM site, there was no press release, nothing at the time (I did my homework…indeed, I’d sat on the story for nearly an hour trying to confirm it). The only thing confirming at the time was a link to the Twitter account from the KevinPM site. Also I’d note, the talking points they ran were nearly IDENTICAL to our post. I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not this many.

In this specific case, that story broke simultaneously in a number of different ways — on the Inquisitr, on Rudd’s own site, people messaging us to let us know, etc. With this in mind, we went back to primary sources (Rudd and Turnbull’s own pages, and our own kn) and wrote our own story.

Most of all I’m disappointed by LeMay; he was a great journalist at the Financial Review, but anything he learned in journalism school has been replaced by him doing his employers bidding. This idea that your don’t source stories in rubbish; mainstream media sites reference stories day in, day out, in both articles and blogs, and give me 2 hours and I could probably find thousands of examples in the mainstream media of them doing so; at the least saying where it came from without a link, with best practice with the link.

ZDNet, at least in Australia, is morally bankrupt. If what LeMay says is true of the whole organization, then the entire company is.

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CNet’s Don Reisinger has delivered a post so bizarre it needs a serious response. In “Windows 7 must appeal to geeks–or else” Reisinger argues in 882 words while keeping a straight face that the key to success for the next version of Windows is keeping geeks happy, because geeks took down Vista. It gets better, because according to Reisinger most people are retarded and look to geeks for advice or get their news second hand from geeks, ipso facto geeks are the center of the universe and geeks will make or break Windows 7.

Now there’s probably a decent case around supporting the notion that geeks should inherit the earth, and how much better we’d all be for it, but that isn’t the case today, and it won’t be tomorrow, next year, or 2020…whenever Microsoft launches Windows 7.

Geeks didn’t bring down Vista, Microsoft did. Geeks were not the root cause of all the bad stories about Vista, the product was. Geeks may help Microsoft sell Windows 7, but the main selling point will be the product itself.

Even in the post Reisinger contradicts himself as he mentions the negative press coverage. The thing he misses is that journalists don’t necessarily equal geeks, even if some of them are. We agree on the point that the wall of negative press contributed to the negative perceptions in the general population, but there’s no great big arrow saying geeks did this either.

We know why Vista failed. Vista failed because it was a poor product when it was released. It lacked support for hardware, software, and if you didn’t have a brand new computer with it installed, it sucked even more. I should know, I switched to being a Mac user because of Vista…and I’m probably a geek, and I couldn’t handle the problems Vista had. Reisinger contends that bad news is fed from the top (being geeks) down, but he ignores the simple fact that most of negative word of mouth came from people who tried Vista themselves, the great unwashed of non-geeks. Hands on use outside the non-geek community was the killer, because basic logic would dictate that most geeks would be able to deal with Vista issues when they arise, non-geeks can’t, at least at the same level. Vista was a crisis in end user usability that gained bad word of mouth from the bottom up, not the other way around.

Reisinger quotes the Mojave Experiment as proof of his point, and yet I don’t recall seeing geeks in those commercials. The Mojave Experiment was an ad campaign aimed directly at the general population that tackled the negative word of mouth THEY had been sharing, nothing a geek had said or done.

Reisinger then argues that the key to Windows 7 should be paved with geek reachout, or “Make sure the geeks love it” as he says. But nothing could be further from the truth. While keeping everyone onside is an obvious marketing and sales strategy Microsoft should and will follow, the key to success in Windows 7 is split between corporates and consumers, with geeks off to the side as an afterthought. The primary objective is to get the product 100% right the day it launches. The second objective is to present a sales case to corporates and consumers. While the natural inclination in most companies is to target the corporate space first, Microsoft’s split and revenue streams are strong on both fronts, so both need to be included. They need to get Windows 7 onto corporate desktops ASAP to expose consumers to the product. By the time 7 launches, many corporations will have been running XP or even 2000 for an exceptionally long time, and if they cut off XP support, 7 will be a natural progression path. For consumers, it’s about end delivery and ease of use. Microsoft needs to borrow the Mac line of it just works, and immediately create positive word of mouth. It’s a fresh start, and done well it will save the Windows franchise.

We also have to accept that Reisinger’s view of the great unwashed technologically retarded outside the geek space is incorrect:

The one thing I don’t understand about Microsoft and countless other companies in the technology industry is why they don’t realize that the influential people are not the average John and Jane Doe. Instead, the technology industry is dominated by a select few who tell their friends and family why a certain product or service is useless.

That may have been the case 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, but it ignores a simple fact that today most households have a computer, many have more, and most have internet access. That is not to say that some have more knowledge than others, and that turning to a relative or friend with a higher understanding of technology isn’t a common occurrence. But Reisinger ignores the fact that in 2008, most families have a base level of technological understanding and knowledge that 20 or even 10 years ago would have been thought impossible. Most people can insert a DVD is a PC and use it. Most can install a program. Everyone with internet access can open a web page. Where as when I was 12 one of my teachers suggested that submitting an assignment typed on a computer may have been cheating, today kids have laptops in class. The base line today is that nearly everyone in the western world knows how to use a computer, and they are able to form an opinion independent of a geek elite. Windows 7 will be a sales challenge, and with a great product they will win this segment even if every geek on the planet says its sucks.

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A burglary at a third-party human resource company included computers with files of Google employees hired prior to 2006, according to a letter from Google to the New Hampshire Attorney General. The files were stored at a company called Colt Express Outsourcing Services and contained names, addresses, and social security numbers.

Some Google employees were notified of the breach as recently as Tuesday. The company is offering to pay for a year-long identity theft monitoring service for those affected.

CNET learned last month 6,500 of its own employee records were also stolen in the same burglary from the office. It is also offering an identity theft monitoring service free of charge to its affected employees.

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According to a company release, the acquisition will make CBS one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States, with a combined 54 million unique users per month, and approximately 200 million users worldwide.

San Francisco based CNET Networks owns sites including CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, mp3.com, CNET news.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon and TechRepublic.

CNet has had a troubled year that started with an attempt by a group of shareholders to take over the board, followed by large scale staff layoffs and even rumors of a possible investment by Google.

The $11.50 per share offer is a 45% premium on CNET’s closing share price of $7.95 Wednesday.

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