I was one of the first to write about the NETGEAR Skype phone, a PC-less Skype phone and I'm almost positive I was the first to acquire an image and post it online. I love the Engadget site and often submit some of my interesting stories to them. I know they picked up at least one of them, namely my Linksys CIT200 Skype phone review.

Anyway, I decided to submit my NETGEAR Skype phone blog post to Engadget and a few other sites, which included my exclusive photo of the NETGEAR Skype phone. But before doing so, I altered the image slightly so I could track to see if anyone used my image and didn't reference my website. Basically, I opened Photoshop, trimmed the whitespace around the original image and added a small red line to the middle of the NETGEAR phone in the black background. Small enough for the average person not to notice, but big enough for me to quickly notice it if anyone "borrowed" my exclusive image.

Well, Engadget took the bait. They posted my image with the red marker and wrote about the NETGEAR Skype phone at 6:50pm on Jan 4th (mine was hours earlier at 2:57pm) and didn't give me credit for the "hat tip". (screenshot of top of the post - notice red marker)


They even kept the same exact filename (with mixed-case) I used (NETGEAR-Skype-phone.JPG) and the same 250x476 resolution. I actually resized the original 2559x3000 image down to my blog's specifications. I almost always resize images to 250pixels wide so I can have the image to the right with enough room for text to wrap on the left. Anyway, here's the original image and original filename (Skype phone_20Dec05 002.jpg) emailed to me by NETGEAR for comparison. It's almost 1MB, so as to not make my home page take forever to load, I resized the original to a thumbnail. Click the image for the full 1MB image, which you will notice doesn't have my Photoshopped red line.


But, I can't hate Engadget - they're still one of my favorite sites with some really great reviews & news. Besides, awhile ago, I was testing a "news" portal and included some of Engadget's content (citing them of course) until I was asked to remove their content, which of course I did. So I guess we're even! :D