TheNextWeb is basically a content farm whose business model is to rapidly push out rewritten posts as soon as possible and as often as possible. Your story doesn't surprise me at all because I see it every single day with many other websites, both popular and not. All you have to do is look at Techmeme to see this in action, every single post is rewritten by some TNW writer, and sadly Techmeme's human curators favor TheNextWeb as a preferred source despite their post model being 100% spinning of existing content. The best case scenario - if the original creator is lucky - is a tiny link to the original source in the footer of a TNW spun article.
To be fair, Huffington Post, Mashable, etc, do the same thing.
To be fair, Huffington Post, Mashable, etc, do the same thing.