A customer (via their customer liaison) had a question about the meaning of the lock overlay icon. Another colleague responded with a link to a site that contained an explanation.

I read the linked article and thought to myself, “Wow, that article sounds an awful lot like something I would have written.” The style of the writing is similar to mine, and the phrases “Given the changes in how people use computers”, “visual clutter”, and “the value … diminishes” particularly struck me.

And it turns out the reason it sounded so familiar was that in fact was something I had written. I wrote my article in 2009, and the plagiarized article came out in 2010.

My colleague apologized. “I realized that I should have searched your blog first. The link I posted was the leading search result on both Bing and Google.”

Great. My original content loses to the site that scrapes my content. I must be doing this wrong.

(This was before they migrated the blog to the new server, so don’t blame the migration for the poor search ranking.)