I ran across a nice forum/article on the art of plagiarism in blogging. I *hate* copy/paste blogs. I don't even mind if people have large contents of material pasted in their blog as long as they at least have some useful comments to make on the subject matter. There may not be a lot of us blogging on this site yet, but I'm always impressed by the content and the way it is presented. I've given up on a lot of other site feeds because I got sick of scrolling through all of the junk to get to the useful posts.
Here is the link to the forum posts: http://slashdot.org/articles/06/05/22/1726224.shtml
Here is the article (it is pretty short actually): http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=238
http://72.14.203.104/search?sourceid=navclient-menuext&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plagiarismtoday.com%2F%3Fp%3D238 (google's cached version because I couldn't get the webpage to come up)
Here's a post from the forums by Opportunist that sums up my feelings fairly well (and yes, I realize I am just copy/pasting it :) But most of my posts are original or just hyperlinks with summaries so I suppose I'll let myself get away with being a little hypocritical on this one.):
Nobody can read the whole internet. Nobody. So what people do is they rely on others to pick the interesting pieces worth reading and go from there.
But there are 2 ways to do it: Summing up the content and providing a link, or ripping a few lines out of context and then mentioning in the fine print where they're from.
While the first is something I do agree with, the second stinks of "I don't have content but I want visitors, but if I hand out my sources my visitors might go there instead of to me."
So while I'm all for gathering info and making it available to your readers, I'm also very much against the "Readers Digest" approach: Snipping out what I deem valuable, copying it to my page and giving half-hearted credit to the real author. Linking is cool. Copy-paste-blogging is just lame.
And I'd really wish this message could be sent to those who do it just that way.