Cut and Paste Bloggers

When I first dwell myself into blogging back in 1997 (back then I remembered knowing nothing about HTML and was merely helping a certain friend to make my school blog), writing a blog was difficult for all of us. Blogger itself was only on a beta stage, there was no template we could follow and constructing a page would mean a whole day of encoding HTML to a free web hosting. Then again, we still made it happen and the idea of blogging was really about writing your own thoughts, your own ideas that you really want to share to the world.

Now, more than ten years (high five on making myself sound old in 10 seconds!) later, blogging is a thing of ease that anyone who wants to share an opinion can do so, with minimal knowledge of HTML if any. This would have been a good thing as now more people can have a voice over the internet and not worry about it.

Problem that I have is against cut and paste bloggers, those who actually STEALS ideas from others, paste them on their blogs and calls them on their own. A new bred of bloggers, which I would conveniently call the "Cut and Paste" Bloggers.

 [ Courtesy of PHDComics ]

I know that a blog topic like this would most likely incur the wrath of a lot of people out there but let me make it real clear here. As per my discussion earlier, I would only categorize "blog plagiarisms" when you fail to do ANY of the following:

1. Pick up an article of any kind from someone else and instead of crediting the work to that person, you call it your own.

2. Not inserting any of your own thoughts or words into the article, quite frankly embracing the idea of "cut and paste"

I floated the idea to Ave and Cereal on this idea and one thing that they mention that a lot of us cut and paste stuff from a lot of people. Agreed that this is common but following the general rule of "Plagiarism" as per how we were thought in school, surely that bloggers out there would at least respect the same principles as it is in real life.

[ Courtesy of Blaugh.com ]

Call me old fashion but I have a beef against those who steals the idea and work of others to call it their own. My intention to blog from the very beginning was to portray my own ideas, not limp on the back of someone's work which has already proven to be popular and hope that you will achieve the same result as well. In my talk with other bloggers in my circle, I've mentioned that already we Asians are labelled as "copycats", we are not helping ourselves out of the situation by reproducing other people's ideas with hope that it will boost the ratings of your own site.

[ Courtesy of Cagle.com ]

For whatever reasons that you would like to put for this, I refuse to believe that we all lack the idea of posting blogs to the extent that we have to steal ideas from others. If this situation would be wrong and punishable heavily in a situation outside of blogging, why should it be any different then?

In the end, I'm sure that a lot of you blog readers out there would agree with me that we would want to see more writers with a little sense of credibility and creativity in their postings rather than mere copycats, blog posts that can at least show some evidence of work into your own creation, rather than just attaching someone else's hard work and call it your own. As most of us would mention, one day you would hate it if it was to happen to you.

Share your thoughts in this people. I welcome all.

Nang this post if you like it guys. Thanks.