| I'll state upfront running a group blog and posting daily is a lot of effort and I commend Roman Stauffer for undertaking it with West Virginia Red.
There's more pressure than most people realize to come up with multiple posts per day on a wide variety of issues important to readers. Some of these issues are very complex. That's why we use links and
Blockquotes
and quotation marks to quote the experts saying things. Plagiarizing is something that's taught early in school is wrong.
One of the important ways the new media of blogs is different than the old media is we're self-policing. Stauffer made a mistake and was caught. We had a blogger here who did something similar and one of our own called the other out on it.
The best thing for Stauffer to do, and I mean this with all sincerity, is to admit he made an error in judgment and move on and not do it again. I say this out of feeling of goodwill from one blog founder to another even if he is on the other side of the aisle. And I also say it as a representative of blogtopia who wants blogs to be taking seriously.
People sometimes fear admitting mistakes will cause them to lose credibility, and we have those people on our side of the blogosphere too. The opposite is true, however. Roman Stauffer and the other activists at West Virginia Red are doing important posts to turn the direction of the West Virginia Republican Party in the direction they want it to go. I don't agree with that direction, but I commend citizen activists for their involvement.
Blogtopia may seem like anarchy at times, but the same rules about plagiarism apply here as they do elsewhere. |
