Jon at Plagiarism Today, amongst others, are covering a lot of the issues cropping up online in terms of content theft and copyright violation. Another issue that’s being discussed is the increasing incidence of bloggers presenting ideas that others have already written about, in a manner that suggests the idea came from elsewhere.

While it’s well-known that you cannot copyright a general idea or a topic, crediting ideas is a professional courtesy, especially when you are presenting something that’s not really yours. Courtesy goes a long way online. If you understand the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, you’ll know why I say this.

Six degrees of separation is the concept that any two people on Earth are separated in knowledge of each other by at most six intermediaries. Although some definitions of this concept say five intermediaries, in my math research, I’ve only seen “six” mentioned, and it’s the definition of always used. I mean, wouldn’t it be called Five Degrees then?

Six degrees is an extremely important sociological concept, and has mutated into the related “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” Hollywood connections game. That in turn led to the idea of a Bacon number. (Go ahead; have some fun and calculate your Bacon number, if you’ve been in a feature film. I’ve been a background actor in a few movies, including Back to the Future with Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, who both have a Bacon number of 2. If I had actually acted in the movie, instead of just appearing in the background, my Bacon number would be 3.)

If you go on pure Six Degrees, though, I can connect myself to a lot of celebrities, especially in the music biz, within 3 degrees or less. So what, right? Well, besides showing off, I actually have a point: You’d be surprised who you are connected to. And that applies in the blogosphere. A smile and link-love go a long way online, and not just because of Six Degrees.

But that said, I have to ashamedly admit that I don’t always credit the sources of my ideas. Not often, but sometimes.

Why not? It’s certainly not due to any malice or jealousy or what have you.  It’s purely due to inefficient methods of recording both new ideas and their sources. I use a variety of software tools to research ideas for future posts, and sometimes that means I forget to record the inspiration.

So how to fix that? Discipline. That’s all I can think of. But failing that, if I personally ever present a new idea that you feel I plundered from your writing, feel free to tell. If it’s true, I’ll more than happily publish a credit/ link to you.

But let’s make a distinction between the above situation and another. Lately, in pressing hard in my research to break stories before some of the ultra-popular bloggers, I have managed to write something “first”. However, because I’m obsessed with editing, I sometimes post an hour or two later. A casual observer might think I stole the idea without attribution. While no one has accused me of that, I’ve been finding this situation occuring more frequently as of late.