Dwayne asks this: Plagiarism, should blogger be exempt?

Of course not… the answer is obvious. Bloggers should not engage with it.

Yes, I really hate plagiarism although there are times that I am doing it on issues which I am not sure who’s the original. However, writing a story by following the suggestions given by Mitch, a guest blogger of John Chow’s blog, I think, can’t be considered plagiarism:

The next time you see an interesting story, instead of immediately linking out to the story why not try and write about it in your own words instead? You’ll get more traffic that way and YOU will be seen as a useful source of information about the story, which will encourage other bloggers to link to you.

The issue here is when you post your opinion on certain topic talked on certain blog (blogpost). Her suggestion, instead of just directly linking to the story by saying:

“John has just posted his opinion of [some topic] on his blog. You can see his post [here]”.

It would be better to write something about the story which includes your opinion and then link back your post to the source by saying:

“I first heard about [whatever you’re blogging about] on John’s blog at www.johnchow.com, so shout out to John for his informative post”.

There’s no plagiarism on this method. Every blogger can do that and most of the bloggers are doing that. Mitch is not telling the bloggers to rewrite the original story as if he’s the owner and original writer.

And if you’ll scan my blogposts you’ll see that it’s the technique I am using here on this blog, although I added them with quotes from the source.

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