Thursday, January 21, 2010

Accusation of Stolen ESL Blog

As most of you know who have been following my ESL blog about my ESL tutoring experiences, as well as ESL tips, grammar tips, etc., I wrote back in September of 2009 that I discovered that someone had stolen my ESL blog. At that time, I filed a complaint with Google. Google researched my claim and took down the site that had stolen my material (they didn't even bother to change anything, the thief stole my blog word for word).

I have personally written each article in this blog based on my experiences teaching ESL, with the exception of a handful of articles from guest writers. You can identify those ESL blog entries because they will give credit to the author.

This blog with the URL of www.esl-tutor.com is the original site. I think if other unscrupulous people are stealing this content, you should be able to identify this because they will have a different URL.

Today, I received an email from an unidentified source accusing me of being the thief. Here is the content of that email sent to my contact page of my main website Teaching ESL to Adults:

"YOUR BLOG IS IDENTICAL TO ONE I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS. SHAME ON YOUR FOR YOUR PLAIGARISM!!!!!!!!!! IT IS UNPROFESSIONAL AND DISGUSTING.

AN ESL TEACHER IN COLORADO (You aren't forthcoming, so I see no need to be forthcoming with my identity, either!)
First Name: ESL Teacher
Last Name:
E-mail Address:
Country: United States
May I post your message on this website? (please choose one): Yes, it's OK to
post my message, name and country. (Due to spammers, I will never post your
email address.)"

Unfortunately, the email writer did not leave his or her email address (which I understand if he or she thinks I am the thief), so I hope he or she will read this post and perhaps get back to me with the URL of the actual plagiarizing ESL blog so that I may report it to Google.

I thank all my followers of this blog and my main ESL site. And I apologize for not writing every day as I did the first year of this blog. I've been spending more time on the main site, so you may want to follow that site for newer material.

Best regards,
Debra Garcia
ESL Tutor

5 comments:

Tutoring blog said...

Sorry to hear that.

Goodwin Schools said...

I can understand how you feel. I make ESL videos for my students and I put a lot of effort into them making sure that its entertaining and not some simple web cam lesson, then one day I found someone was downloading them and trying to sell them!Something I was giving away for free to begin with.

Its good that Google delisted the site in the end though.

ali0482 said...

i like your spirt

Jane said...

Debra,
I'm wondering if you'd want to add my ESL blog to your "blogroll". I'm also a teacher and have had an ESL podcast website up for a few years, and with our website is also a blog. The website is www.eslhelpdesk.com. We began with podcasts on grammar, communication, American history and culture, and now we are putting our entire "Grammar HELP! Student Handbook" up onto the site, and have added audio to a few of those lessons already so they will become podcasts too. I'm a long-time ESL teacher (M.Ed.) and developed software (Easy Writer) to teach writing and the website evolved from the software. I hope you'll add our site; maybe it will be one of your favorites! Please contact me at easywriter@hotmail.com if you have any questions.
Yours,
Jane

vce tutoring said...

I hate it when this sort of thing happens. I have in the past some of my main sites hacked by punks who think it's funny putting up terrorist messages when someone landed on one of my sites. But stealing a site, well, that would be more infuriating.