Earlier today I wrote about how the Saturday Night Live Ticket Lottery was open for the upcoming season.

I had come across this news earlier the previous day and wrote my post last night. A few hours after I had posted about the SNL lottery, I saw that I was being accused of plagiarism by someone on Twitter!

Now I take an accusation like that pretty seriously and was really pissed off. Especially since it is not true.

I felt like I had two choices, I could either ignore the tweet or respond. The thing is that by ignoring the accusation (to me) felt like I’d be admitting guilt. Since I wasn’t guilty, I couldn’t let it slide.

Here is the initial exchange from marc (twitter user @spicpics):

Basically, because Will Run For Miles (Kathy) had posted about this 12 hours before me, I had copied her post according to Marc.

First of all, I had no clue that she had posted about this and to be honest, even if I did why would that matter to me? According to these accusations, it means any time I find something to write about, if someone else writes about it before I publish my post, I am not allowed or I need to give credit! Why? I had come across this info on my own and decided to write about it at night for the following morning’s post.

(For those of you that don’t know, a post published around 7:30am is not written minutes before, it’s written at least the day/ night before. I also write many of my other posts in advance.)

In his Tweets, Marc had said that “you follow her on Twitter, I clearly saw it, rewrote it & posted it as your own“. Well yes I do follow her on Twitter but no I do not stalk her or anyone on Twitter. I never saw her tweet or her post anywhere else. So yes, this was my own post.

It seems like it’s always easy to assume and accuse. I guess that’s how it goes on the internet… for some.

So I was accused of plagiarizing for not giving a HT to someone who I didn’t find my information from.

What’s a HT, some might wonder? A HT or hat tip is a way you can give credit in a post for writing about the info/ story someone else found. I think it is very nice to do this if you did in fact find your info from the cited source. Well in this case I didn’t even know that Kathy wrote a post about SNL tickets so why would I credit her site?

While this was going on, another person joined in the attack, Pradesh Vadeep (@PradeshVadeep).

On Tuesday, I wrote about Delta Airlines banning the transport of hunting trophies. My post was based on an article I had read from the New York Times online on Monday. Many news outlets covered this story. Well it turns out that Kathy wrote about this topic on Monday so according to Pradesh I must be copying whatever she posts. I guess Pradesh doesn’t think it could be a coincidence that two bloggers wrote about headline news.

Well, I did know of Kathy’s post about Delta banning hunting trophies. While I was in the middle of writing my post I received a direct message from her related to it. The conversation isn’t important but again, I did not learn of Delta’s ban from her blog, I cited my source, the New York Times.

So are all bloggers supposed to scour the internet (or at least BoardingArea and Prior2Boarding) to make sure that nobody wrote about a topic before they do? And if someone else published something first, is a HT required to be cleared of plagiarism?

Well sorry, that won’t be happening here. I’ll continue to post as usual and live up to the high standards I have set for my site.

I’ve been writing my blog for over 3 years, it will be 4 in October. In all of this time, I’ve written all of my posts (heck it is my blog) and I’ve never been accused of plagiarism before.

It sure is nice of Marc and Pradesh to be so concerned about Kathy (Will Run For Miles) getting her credit. However, I’ll give credit when credit is due.

Like Randy Petersen (or Al Gore said) “Internet is Big“. So please don’t be so quick to accuse.