Blogoplaigarism

There’s a trick to writing that never works in academics. The trick? Do no research.

If you don’t do any research, then there’s no possible way for you to plaigarise anyone else’s ideas. I like this line of reasoning. It means that so long as you come up with the same ideas independently and entirely on your own, then it’s not plaigarism!

In education, this method gets short-circuited because you are required to do painful things like “cite your sources” and “write a bibliography.” On the internet, however, and in the blogosphere particularly, there’s nothing to keep it in check.

I almost never run a technorati search on a topic when I start to write about it. I’ll cite people (with links, which is way cooler than any of that MLA stuff) if I happen to read them and like their ideas, but more often than not I’ll simply trod on the intellectual toes of fifty other bloggers without even knowing it.

Is this a problem? Technically speaking probably not. But it’s probably why they call this place an echo chamber.