Cut N Paste Blogging. It’s LIKE creating your own content, right?

Um. No. And yet, Jennifer Leggio, a dear Twitter friend and an uber smart security chick, had to point that out to people on her ZDnet Blog.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with Jennifer, as well as with Al Krueger from Comet Branding whose post, “Regurgitator or Originator”, is what brought the whole Copy+Paste+Publish phenomenon to light.

Copy+Paste+Blog is when the blog author does one of the following:

• Posts only snippets of another blog with a link to said blog, sometimes posing a question but rarely offering additional ideas
• Using a blog solely for research and referencing that blog without doing the background work on his or her own 

Yes, I totally cut and pasted that from Jennifer, and like she said, if I wanted to just C/P/P, I’d ask you what you think and sign off. But that to me seems like lazy blogging. Where’s the author’s own opinion or voice here? If you just cut+paste+publish, why are you even bothering to blog?

I read blogs for the opinions and information offered by the author. Sure, I use a good number of blogs as source information, but I also make sure that I track down additional news stories, the original blog articles and additional opinions as well so that I can add to the conversation, not just regurgitate other people’s words. And if I can’t find something that I want to add to the conversation, then I don’t bother blogging it. There’s tons of other things in the world to blog about.

If you want to make sure that you’ve got your own thoughts out there – there’s some things you’ve got keep in mind, particularly the tenets of traditional journalism. To me, these were no brainers, but then I come from a PR/Journalism background. It’s just a given to me to follow the trail and find out what I can before posting madly.

If you remember these two things (well, ok it’s kinda three or four things in two points, but you’re smart. You’ll find it all), you should manage to avoid the majority of the problems Cut – N – Paste blogging presents:

• Don’t bandwagon jump – climbing onto the “me too!” bandwagon is only going to stir up the waters more, instead of adding to the conversation.  If you haven’t experienced something for yourself, and you don’t go tracking down the original information, then shush.
• Which brings me to: Find your own sources. Yes, absolutely, use the blogs you read as inspiration, but make sure you’ve got the true story and also that you formulate your own ideas, opinions and sources.

(image source: Vinyl Pulse)