I Wish These Guys Would Stop (Allegedly) Stealing My Stuff...

Now I know who all the people who find this site through Semrush and Whorush and simple Google Searches are: They appear to be mostly Bloggers -- who get paid while I don't -- who may be stealing my stuff. I ain't got no proof, but I got a laundry list of coinkydinks.

I wrote this three days ago. The only difference is that, true to the Ur-Conservative principle of discussing matters of money before all else, some people are starting to ask the additional question of who's paying for the new conflict in Libya. I'm seeing many of the same points being made by other bloggers and columnists long after I made them.

This is the second time (I believe that) I've noticed another blogger basically posting something I've already written which happens to coincide with a flurry of Semrush and Whorush hits (in case you don't know, Whorush and Semrush are companies which rank blog/websites by various traffic factors in order to let advertisers know which sites may be the best advertising investments for them. It can also, if you really think about it, be used to gauge the relative anonymity of those blogs/webpages so that if you were so inclined, you can rip them off and still have a plausible defense for it: I couldn't have stolen his work, Your Honor. Look: Semrush says that hardly anyone ever visits his site, and it's highly unlikely I -- a Professional Writer, as opposed to the Plaintiff, who could hardly write a Thank You Note -- would have come across such an obscure author, even by accident!

If a blog has a sizable following and a great number of visitors, then you can't steal their posts very easily because there are simply too many eyeballs, and the chance that the same pair of eyeballs catches the same, or near-same, post on another blog increases. If not, then apparently, it's fair game, and really, who's to know? It's just weird that I wrote something about polar bears once, and then S.E. Cupp wrote the same things ten months later, almost word-for-word, and now I ask ten questions about Libya, and a bunch of other people write basically the same crap that I did, and they all got paid.

Now, I really can't accuse anyone of much of anything based upon such flimsy evidence, but it does make me somewhat suspicious. It's also possible that two people working in complete ignorance of one another can manage to come up with the same ideas, so whatthe fuck do I I know? But this is starting to get spooky.

UPDATE: Edited to remove someone's name that I put in there by mistake. I meant to identify another author/blogger, but got confused. Sorry!