I Can't Figure Out if I'm Honored or Insulted

I usually write when I'm motivated; if I'm forced to write, I turn out pulp. When I began a weekly blog about stupid things people said a while back, it quickly became a chore when the weekend arrived and I drew a blank.

Oh, that doesn't mean the week passed without stupidity, it just means nothing rose above my threshold of stupidity that week, or I missed something I shouldn't have. I confess I'm a tad sarcastic in my writings because ... I don't suffer fools easily.

One of the nice things about writing a blog is that the toolset of the blog host is rich; it gives me information on hits, sources, rough locations and the like. Occasionally, I peruse them mostly out of curiosity to see if real numbers are reading my writings. Some blogs are blah and some have some real good numbers. Publishing my work to Facebook brings many readers and if the blog is contentious (as some of them are), it also brings comments. Some are favorable, some are not. Either way, I don't censor them. If people honor me by reading my words, I honor them by letting them tell me I'm a bastard if that's the way they feel.

So it was with surprise that after my last blog, I saw a source visiting my blog I had not seen before: plagscan.com. Curious as to what that was, I googled and visited it. It turns out it's a plagiarism checking website; one with both single-user and business/education subscription tiers. I looked into their rates and it looks like they lean heavily towards educational subscribers to make money.

I asked myself "Self, what is somebody doing running my blog writing through a plagiarism scanning website?"

Initially, I admit I was somewhat miffed that somebody thinks I'm not the author of my written thoughts; so much so that they would check my work to see if it is/was plagiarized. Maybe they were hoping to call me out on it because they vehemently disagreed with my words. If it came back as plagiarized (and looking at how the scanners work, they start with three sequential words and go from there), maybe they could finish their comments with Go to hell, you plagiarizing &*!#@.

Let me assure you: My writings are original and the product of my ideas and work. If I embed somebody else's work inside them (as I did once when I credited Stilton.com for nicely phrasing my exact thoughts), I give them credit.

I've written some unpublished books and don't think I'll bother to ever get an ISBN number for them. I'm working on my third book and that one, I will probably publish. (It's about small town politics, my 12 years on the Town Board I live in and how 5 seemingly good and decent people can reveal what utter fools and sometimes outright crooks they are.) I also construct crossword puzzles when an idea tickles my fancy.

But I don't steal other peoples work, and that's why I'm confused when I see somebody, probably with educational system ties run my work through a plagiarism scanning website. Do they think I'm not capable of writing what they just read? Do they think I'm a word thief? Are my ideas so unoriginal that they deserve to be called out as old news?

I don't know. But now that I'm tuned up on plagiarism scanners, I decided to run my last blog through one of the free scanning websites to see if in fact I was a plagiarizer. It turns out ... I'm innocent.

Here's a snapshot of some of the referring sites that hit that blog including plagscan.

I trimmed the picture to not display now many hits came from plagscan, but I will say it was more than one.

So, should I be insulted or honored that my words motivated somebody to run one or more of my blogs through a plagiarizing scanner? As I jokingly tell people when I'm answering an obvious question ...

I'm ... so ... confused.