Republishing others’ content

Mar 12, 2007

Blogging most often than not involves taking “cues” from other sources and then publishing your own views on your blog. This sometimes involves copy/pasting chunks of text from other sources. We all do that, and nobody minds as long as the entire thing is not published and you mention a link to the original piece.

The Blog Herald has a post titled Better ways to re-hash other people’s content where Abe refers to another post on Online Marketing Blog titled 4 Ways to Successfully Re-Post Others Content and Abe’s post caught my fancy because on Friday I wrote something similar for a client of mine. I think this is what makes blogging great — this coming together of different minds irrespective of caste, race and social status to talk about ideas and issues. No matter who you are, if you have a blog and an opinion, you can easily share your words with others. Even if you don’t have blog of your own, you can still convey your opinions by participating in the comment sections of popular, subject-specific blogs.

Coming back to using content from other blogs. Some blogs simply publish external links, and unless it is a link directory like popurls.com, it is not very inspiring to read those blogs. Some people copy/paste the entire post with a small, perfunctory link in the end. People want to read what you think of the entire matter. By the time they come to your blog they might have already read about the topic on various blogs, and unless you offer some unique perspective they are not going to stay on your blog and worse, they may never return to your blog thinking that you post nothing original and worth-reading. It’s the worse form of self-promotion I think because you actually draw people to your unoriginal posts because of your trackbacks appearing on the popular posts you link to.

The best way to publish others’ content is, as both the posts talk about, publish the main highlights accompanied by your text carrying your thoughts on the subject.

Technorati Tags: content publishing, blogging