In a little over a week the Internet Marketing Monitor will celebrate it’s six month anniversary. We’re quite proud of what we’ve accomplished in that time frame: we’ve expanded to four regular writers, written 800 articles, received 500 comments, and continue to watch as just about every graph related to our site continues to point up.

Between server logs, analytics software, “tools” like MyBlogLog, and a couple of WordPress extensions, we’ve got a pretty good idea of our traffic, reach, and visitor information. And while it is by no means huge, that traffic and reach continues to grow at a steady pace. If I had the time to do so, I could sit and watch in virtual real time as people move enter, move around, and exit the site.

Unfortunately, the other thing that those log files, extensions, and tracking software show is that Internet Marketing Monitor content is routinely “used” as inspiration for which no credit is ever extended. How do I know this? Because I’ll publish something at 11 am… watch someone read it at 12 pm… and then notice they’ve posted a similar article by 1 pm. Once is coincidence. Maybe twice. But when it continues to happen over and over again on a number of sites, I know something is up.

One thing that you’ll notice here is that I always give credit, even for inspiration. Even if something I’ve read elsewhere sends me in an entirely different direction, I’m a link-giving fool who acknowledges when the original, hard work of someone else has inspired me.

What does it take to get the same respect in return? How long does one have to stand outside of a community before being acknowledged by it… especially when that community is more than happy to use you as a source of inspiration? Now I’m not saying our content is being ripped off. Well… it actually is by more than a few scraping sites. But even those scraping sites, whether intentionally or not, link back here when they take something.

What I’m talking about is the fact that a community that preaches the value and importance of linkage does very little itself. I’m talking about the fact that the same stories with the same opinions and the same ideas get tossed around on a few websites everyday… and they’re all linked up. Yet even when new perspectives and different viewpoints (which you’d think a community would appreciate) are presented, they go ignored or - better yet - end up being republished elsewhere as “original content”.

We may be the new folks on the block around here… but that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve credit for our work.