The PlagiarismToday blog has a good post up about blogs and “gray-area” plagiarism. Of particular concern is the ease with which large quotes or entire articles from one source can be posted on another.

Even with proper attribution, there’s a certain ethical blurriness to the practice of regularly using content from other blogs on your own. And as the post notes, even the perfectly legitimate citing of a quote or excerpt from another blog introduces its own set of problems—people are less likely to read the source article when presented with a nice summary quote, and it’s easy to manipulate or unintentionally miscommunicate an article’s message with careless or misleading quotations.

Certainly not a problem unique to the web, but it’s an ethical breach easily committed on a blog. Definitely worth keeping in mind.