Dean Giustini emailed me the other day about how an interview he had done had made it into Google's annual report, yet failed to provide a citation for where the interview came from. I have been swamped recently at work but thankfully David Rothman published a post on it.

The quote is within the Founders' Letter from Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the beginning of the annual report where they illustrate how Google has affected users lives. There are 22 quotes, each with the name of the person who said it, however there is accompanying reference information. It appears that some of the 22 quotes come from letters to Google, however some do not. Using Google, I found not only Joshua Schwimmer's quote lifted from Dean's interview but others as well.

Examples:

• Jo Guldi's quote was originally posted 3/14/2007 on her blog how Google Books helped with her dissertation.
• Quincy Smith, President CBS Interactive, his quote is from a November 22, 2006 press release stating how YouTube users are "clearly being entertained by the CBS programming they're watching."
• Arun Shivar quote was from an interview for an article 11/10/2006 on ITVIDYA.com where farmers are using Google Earth in their fight for land compensation rights.
• Adrian Sannier quote was taken from multiple sentences within his blog post 10/16/2006 regarding ASU and Google.
• Cosmo Buono quote was taken from an interview by Jefferson Graham for an article 10/30/2006 in the USA Today regarding Google ad sales.
  

All of these quotations should have included the name of the person the quote was being attributed but it also it should have included where that quote originated from, especially if it was from something other than direct communications to Google. Sloppy Google, very sloppy.

Labels: Google