Right, bound to happen at some point, but I was hoping it wouldn’t: Trailing Grouse is SUCH a bloody cool name (ok, I may be biased) and “..so pretty and witty and wise”, that someone has nicked it. Yep. What is more irksome, is that the thief/ves just copy and pasted it and the blog tagline onto their site and, in addition to aggregating some of my blog posts, have a load of rubbish underneath it.

The site is agnabee.com and they’ve got me down as a blog writer (from what I can tell). It seems they’ve now closed the ‘blog’ to further posts since I posted a reply message complete with a link to my blog (which they deleted) - but not removed the TG ‘blog’ and subsequent drivel! Niiiiiiiice.

Now, I’m not alone (so no, it’s not just because I’m pretty), Whazzup Egypt has suffered too, and I suspect that there are other Egypt expat bloggers out there who are also having their posts either systematically or randomly posted by the aggregator. If you are checking your blog stats frequently, then this sort of thing will harm your numbers. If you are the product of educational institutions that drill into students the abhorrent nature of plagiarism, you’re likely to feel cheated.

The idea behind the website is good and helpful, although not the first time a website has been set up for expats/foreigners in Cairo/Egypt - they normally end up being more popular with non-expats - but plagiarising either manually or by aggregator in order to make your blog look more established is not.