Deep Jive Interests

In more local blogging news, another Canadian politician — or, I should say, wannabe politician, Jane Pitfield was found to have ripped off plagiarized the content of other blogs for her political blog in the race to become Toronto’s next mayor.

What’s quite interesting is how when some of these “smaller” blog stories don’t hit the usual outlets how muted (or absent) the reaction is in some circles, compared to, obviously, the hew and cry if it happened to an A-list luminary.

At any rate, its first covered in the Star, and later commented on by Amber Mac (local Torontonian, now!) but basically:

This past weekend under the headline, “Pitfield takes Spacing’s word — literally,” Spacing magazine accused Pitfield of lifting several sentences in her Oct. 7 campaign blog from a column that appeared the day before on SpacingVotes, a daily blog about public space issues that’s been running during the 2006 municipal election.

There were also passages from a Globe and Mail article that appeared July 10, according to the magazine. Last night, at a campaign stop in Scarborough, Pitfield said it wasn’t a case of plagiarism. Instead, she said, a campaign staffer merely failed to properly credit the material.

Furthermore, lest you think she tried to quote SpacingVotes, according to the blog itself:

From Oct. 7th to Oct. 12th, her blog post contained, almost word-for-word, a paragraph from Lorinc’s column. In Ms. Pitfield’s other blog posts, she used the word “I”, which would indicate that the posts on the blog were based on her own opinion, and possibly written by her. Before the blog was removed from her site, it was titled “Jane’s Blog.”

With little fanfare, Ms. Pitfield decided to take down the posts for good measure — however, she didn’t “look all that contrite” (although she later apologized 3 times).  You know, much like the apologists in the Edelman PR Quagmire, of course this “new media thang” is something that we’re all getting used to, and yes, new “rules” are being made all the time.

But come on.

Plagiarism is as old as English — particularly when the passage you lift uses the word “I”. Amber Mac also points out that Ms. Pitfield probably doesn’t write the blog on her own, because that’s how she’s able to disavow the plagiarization that took place.

Ghostblogging? How about “Gogging”? Can we enter that in the blogging lexicon? Maybe right after “flog” :) In fact, with junior ad execs maybe writing those flogs for Edelman, it might be that they’re not “flogs” after all, but “gogs”?
So yes, we can add the following “rules” to blogging:

* write it yourself – or if you can’t, be so convincing no one will figure out that you aren’t “gogging”.