Is it plagiarism, or is it the communal beauty of the internet?

I received this today from Australian Leadership Guru, Matt Church. Check him out and consider signing up for his newsletter. He gives a brief nugget of helpful info, then a shameless plug for his products or events and then a gift, usually a link to something else helpful to our thinking, leadership or networking.

I copied and pasted this directly from his newsletter with little tweaking and nearly no additional thoughts reworked. I did correct a punctuation error in the original.

23 March 2010

Is it plagiarism?

Dear Jill,

Thought leaders are required to know first what is being said by other leading thought leaders.

Reading others books and blogs is a great way to do this.

Often you might quote what one author said in your speech or advice session.

For example, in one of Seth Godin's books, Meatball Sundae, he quotes something like 6 (I stopped counting) other current books. What he does however (and we can model this), is interpret the message into a new context, not just regurgitate what some one else could read.

Here is a plan for borrowing ideas...

1. Quote the source
2. Add to the message somehow using your expertise
3. Encourage people to go to the source and tell them how and why
4. Twitter and Facebook about the source and encourage your followers to follow them
5. Advance the sources business, positioning or prestige anyway you can
   

Respecting and acknowledging the source is a key to growing who you are as a thought leader, it forces you to go beyond "Thought Repeatership".

Be meticulous when nicking someone else's ideas. The web is transparent!

Check out the Creative Commons Licence to explore the attribution rights framework. Some great thinking around the sharing of ideas.

You can follow Matt Church on Facebook and on Twitter

This post was mostly just to highlight how to avoid plagiarism on the internet.

Bob Jensen's Threads on Plagiarism Detection