Simultaneous Thinking

posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

I had a horrible thought the other day.

There are about a bazillion blogging Christian ladies out there (just click on the 'CWO' link on the sidebar if you haven't yet and see what I mean). I've got a bare handful that I've actually read; there's just not enough time in the day to get to all of them.

But, as I was preparing last week's Bible study, I found another blogger had written on the same topic and looked at it from an angle I hadn't considered. Her post caused me to see some things there I hadn't seen...and probably wouldn't have seen if I had not happened to read it. Now what? I linked back to her post and went ahead with my thoughts on the passage. What else could I have done?

But it made me think of one of the dangers of blogging. How can I prove I didn't copy something from someone else out there in blogland? With so many blogging ladies, it's very possible that two (or more!) of us could be reading Scripture and have a similar revelation and blog about it...totally unknown to each other.

I've seen instances sort of like that amongst the sewing bloggers. In one case, one lady (A) made a statement and another blogger (B) took it personally and got offended over it...when A hadn't even seen whatever it was on B's blog and her remark had nothing whatever to do with that. It was a total coincidence, but there were hurt feelings and unpleasantnesses.

As I see it, that's just going to be a hazard of public blogging; you can kind of step on each other's mice without realizing you've done it. Maybe without even having any way of realizing you've done it.

So, let me state right here that if I *ever* see something on someone else's blog that triggers a revelation that gets mentioned here, I will absolutely link back to the original post, like I did last week. If I have NOT linked to another post, then it came out of my own head; it's not meant to be either a comment about or a plagiarism of someone else's writing, even if by coincidence it looks similar to someone else's posting.

And I guess you'll just have to take my word for that; it can't ever be proven.

Oh, and the little byline that I *try to remember to* post at the top isn't because I fear one of my Christian sisters might use my words, it's because there are folks out there who swipe whole posts verbatim and post them in their blogs as their work. They do this because of keywords in those posts that will cause search engines to hit them; they are trying to increase their hits to generate revenue from the ads on their sites. It's sad, but it happens (it happened to a friend of mine who blogged about surviving a potentially fatal illness; the illness googled, and someone plagiarized her post). Anyway, the byline is supposed to help avoid that.

Does anyone have any ideas about dealing with the likelihood of totally unrelated posts looking quite similar? It's bound to happen; we're all dealing with the same human experience and being led by the same Holy Spirit; it's only the Enemy who tries to convince us that our circumstances are unique...