I often come across blogs that are reusing the content of other blogs without the author’s permission. Unfortunately, I’ve even seen this done by school technology integrators, school administrators, and teachers. Generally, when I ask those people why they have copied and pasted someone else’s content, the answer is something along the lines of “well the content is good and I want my teachers to be able to find it all in one place.” I understand those peoples’ desire to centralize content, but copying and pasting entire blog posts of someone else is not the correct way to do it. It’s not correct for at least two reasons. First, it’s plagiarism. Second, whether they run ads or not and whether they admit it or not, bloggers love page views. We love to see how many people are coming to our blogs. And by lifting entire posts, you’re denying us those page views we crave.

Sue Waters has some great words of wisdom about this issue too. One of the things that Sue points out is that while the web is all about sharing, it’s also important to respect the time and effort that a person puts into his or her blog posts. I encourage you to read all of Sue’s comments here.

So then if you are trying to collate good information to share with your colleagues what is an appropriate way to do it? One way to do it is to use the title and perhaps a few sentences of the blog post then place a “read more” link to direct readers to the actual source and full content. Another appropriate way to collate and distribute many blog posts is to place an RSS feed widget in the sidebar of your blog. These widgets will automatically update with blog post titles and the beginning of the new articles when your favorite blogs update.

RSS feed widgets will accomplish two things for you. First, once you’ve set-up and installed the widget you won’t have to go to each blog individually to find the latest updates. Second, RSS feed widgets will provide the links to the direct sources of each article so that your visitors can read and comment on the original author’s words.

Where can you get one of these RSS feed widgets? If you’re using Blogger, there is a built-in capacity for this. To add and display the RSS feeds of other blogs select “design” from your Blogger dashboard, choose “add gadget,” then select “blog list.” The blog list gadget will prompt you to add the urls of your favorite blogs. If you’re using another platform for your blog or you don’t like the one offered through Blogger, here are some 3rd party customizable RSS feed widgets; Pheed.me, and WebRSS. Of the two, I’ve found WebRSS easier for first time users to customize and install. If you’re using WordPress.org for your blog here’s another widget you can try. Finally, Robin Good has a long list of tools and widgets that you can use to syndicate RSS feeds.