The journey from there to here
Published on September 22, 2005 By Gideon MacLeish In Blogging

I saw another blogger lambasted today for apparently "stealing" another blogger's idea and incorporating it into their own article. Having been previously accused of the same, I felt it was a good topic for discussion.

When I log on to JU, I don't have the time to peruse blog articles of the last several days. Being limited to a few hours' access three or four times a week, once I have purged, checked, and answered my email, I read the recent forum posts. Then I begin blogging on articles that have been stirring in my head for days.

For sometime after Hurricane Katrina, that was the topic. Sometimes CPS is the topic. Other times, fiscal responsibility and small government, key components of my Libertarian philosophy, are topics. But it is not infrequent for my topic to be related to current events. It is, in fact, natural.

The fact that the argument put forth in the blog is similar to arguments elsewhere on JU is, again, not coincidence. The majority of JU's conservative bloggers tend to have a general neutrality towards Libertarian philosophy, if not a complete sympathy, and their sentiments are echoed in their blogs.

So next time you read a blog that seems to be more of the "same old, same old", don't write it off hastily as a copycat blog. It may be just that. But then again, it may be individual ideas, expressed differently.


Comments
on Sep 22, 2005

We all watch the same news, and none of us have the time to read every blog. I have a bad habit of coming in, writing something, and then sitting down to look over the forums. So often I find that someone wrote the same thing I did just a few hours before. I need to read first and then write. What I hate the most is seeing people take pundit opinion and race here to post it as their own.

Not saying anything about anyone in particular, but sometime notice the topic of that day's Rush/O'reilly/Scarborough rants, and then count the minutes before you see them "inspire" something here...

" The only time I find it annoying is when a blogger who has been participating on the original thread goes off and starts one of their own on the same topic, which forces people to conduct the same conversation in two different places, repeating themselves on both threads. "

I admit I have done it. Sometimes I feel I want to look at a different aspect of the conversation. Other times I want to drag something from the bowels of a comment pile that very few people will ever delve into.

One person got REALLY mad at me once for starting a blog about his comment that Republicans were less intelligent than Democrats. It wasn't that I wanted to steal his idea, it was the fact that I knew that there were numerous people here who were never going to read the discussion, and I thought the concept needed to be *cough* outed, if you will.

I've noticed some people like to be all nice and fair in their articles, and once their discussion has gone south they turn into hate-spewing demons. Since I can't go up and paste their hate in their original article (where it honestly belonged to show their real feelings), I have a bad habit of dragging it to the top of MY blog to comment on.

At least I link all the articles I do that too, though, and I don't do it often.

on Sep 22, 2005
I tend to think it's simply a coicindence if two blogs are about the same thing, just the other day Dharma had a
neat post, complete with link, about her childhood home. Just because I've been writing about my childhood
home I didn't think she had "copied my idea"!! For crying out loud....

In it she mentioned a childhood friend that she had
lost and that piece of information clinched it for meto write about a childhood friend
I had lost.
I'd been rolling the idea around in my mind for awhile, writing
about childhood friends and have several "chapters" .
The idea originally came to me after I'd written about my highschool sweetheart, Val K.
and his sad life.

BTW, if someone does copy your ideas, the better writers' blog will be more interesting anyway......
and then there's the loyalty factor! Quite a few of the regulars here have a strong following!

I want to write about ALOT of friends I've had along the way.
on Sep 22, 2005
Little Whip once stole a blog idea right out of my head and posted it just hours before I had planned to do it. No joke. Although I did the sad dance inside, I did comment on it and told her so (not that I was doing a sad dance, but that I'd had the idea).
on Sep 22, 2005
terp stole an idea about two days ago that I actually had a "to do" note on my desk about. It was really wierd in that it covered something that wasn't "current events". I've installed a firewall and doubled the thickness of my tin foil hat...