If you know someone is taking the ideas behind each one of your posts, and then rewriting them to publish on their own blog, how would you feel about that? How would you deal with it? It is something I have recently noted on a blog I used to really like. It seems as I write articles on here, sometime a week or two later, an original article with the same topic shows up on the other blog.

At first, I thought it was just coincidence, but it just happened again. A post I had written less than a week ago has been written from scratch and put on a blog more popular than this one.

While I do like being a source for ideas, I don’t like how this person is going about it. I really don’t know how I feel over this whole thing. They aren’t copying my article text. They aren’t linking back to me, but they are using my posts to come up with their post topics.

Am I a victim of the huge echo chamber of the web?

While I know there is nothing I can do about this whole thing, and I should probably try to be pleased that they think so highly of me, it can be really hard for me to come up with post ideas, and while I can’t say that I have never taken a post idea from someone else’s blog, I usually try to stick to their long ago archives, while this person is taking less than a week to basically repurpose my ideas.

It is a very strange feeling. I would love to hear what my readers think about all of this. And if the person “stealing my ideas” reads this, I wonder if they even realize they are doing it?

Note: They aren’t copying my posts, but instead taking the general idea of my post and re-writing them from scratch. None of my content is being stolen… just every post idea I have that appeals to their audience. I don’t know if that changes anything for anyone, but I wanted to make sure everyone understood that fact.

Originally posted on January 16, 2008 @ 7:01 pm