Blog Plagiarism is Lame

Here are a couple of popular ways personal blogs are used:

• as a journal, writing your personal thoughts down in your own words


• as a collection of quoted excerpts or links to articles/sites you want to share, maybe adding comments about what you found interesting or what you disagreed with

Then there's a different way to blog:

• find content you like that other people have written, copy it and change a few words here and there, and post it to your blog as if you had written it, without crediting the original author

Wikipedia defines plagiarism as "the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." Another term for this in relation to web content is "content scraping".

I haven't been blogging for very long, and I don't blog frequently. I can type quickly, but I write slowly. It can take me a long time to come up with phrasing that I'm satisfied with. So it's disconcerting to see a post from my handful of posts "remixed" on someone else's blog (and I do mean handful; this is a shared blog).

Whether it's called plagiarism, drive-by scraping, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", or whatever, I call it lame. If you like what someone else has written, just link to it and give 'em their props.