Get Ready For…

I saw something on BoingBoing which intrigued me:

Livejournaller Crisper points out that January 27th (Lewis Carroll’s birthday) is the fifth annual “Rabbit Hole Day,” wherein bloggers and journallers change their blogging style for 24h. I’ll be getting off an overnight flight returning from the awesome Cryptic Confusion science fiction convention outside of Detroit that morning, but who knows, maybe I’ll whomp up a post or two about my personal life, pets, or similar on the cab ride back into town…

At first read I almost wholely misunderstood the intent of this. Change my blogging style for 24 hours?  That, in my case, would mean posting something at the beginning of the day rather than the end of the day! Aside from that — my blogging style is pretty eclectic as it is. And since I usually don’t post more than once in a 24-hour day — it really wouldn’t affect me in the same way as some who do…

(I suppose I could spent January 27 refraining from using “–” in my blog entries.  Apparently I doublehypen quite a bit…)

(And I overuse elipses.)

I saw it as something different — something which I’ve seen on April Fools Day in the blogosphere and elsewhere. I’m reminded of an April Fools Day a while back where daily strip cartoonists decided to trade authorships for the day.  So the guy who usually drew Garfield (Jim Davis) would pen “For Better or For Worse.” Everyone would have a chance to play “dress-up” with each others work.

Let’s face it: I’ve completely run out of blogging ideas. I could just choose generic memes and fill them out, but there’s plenty of creativity out there in my blog circles which I’ve seen.  It got me thinking:  is it unethical to steal other people’s ideas and post them to my blog? Would something like that be deemed plagiarism? What if I change a few inconsequential details around, a la McDowell’s restaurant in Coming to America? Would that still be plagiarism?

It probably would be, yes. Which is why I present:

In two short days I will lay claim to the best of the PRB* and pretend to be all clever for using ideas that were not originally mine.  I was thinking of attributing the work of others for people to reference, but I’m still struggling with that: how can I attribute and call it plagiarism?  I suppose I’ll determine the answer for that starting on Tuesday and continuing for the next seven days.

Stay tuned…

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* People’s Republic of Blogistan, a term that I made up myself.**

** See? I’m doing it already!