So, it got me thinking.....everyone (almost) reads a gazillion blogs a day..either directly ..or thru word of mouth or sometimes via a bunch of people who read some other blogs..and link to them or make some kind of reference to the other blogs either as their daily grind or interesting finds on an almost daily basis. So, for example , if I am reading Jason Haley's blog and in his section of the day's interesting finds, he points to an article published on some other blog, I click on that link, and if I like it , I add it to my list of favorites....which is good to a huge extent....coz I am able to read it later or any other time I choose. Now, the major advantage of this apporach is that... I get the most updated version of the article...which is good...and at the same time...if the same author puts up some new article/blog post, I can see it and read it...great.

Now, for sometime I have been doing something on the same lines...and lately..when I was looking into my bookmarks/favs, I realized that some of the links did not work anymore (mind you... i said SOME dont work). Generally..this is coz the author has discontinued use of his/her old blog-hosting provider..and has gone ahead to get his/her own domain and thus his/her own blog....which is great...but ... bad for me..coz it rendered my links useless.

Now, that got me thinking.....upon this idea....and no..its not a completely original idea....and yes...i have seen some people do something quite similar to this....but a bit different...so I decided to improvise on it.

Now....just a quick pre-idea notes.... i am working on my own website...and need a lot of content for it....lets say..for now...am looking at the articles section. And in some of my folder...i have a huge collection of articles I plucked off the internet..via numerous links...some are stored as word files...some pdf's and the rest are as print outs. What if.... I put up the complete articles on my site....ya...making sure I give credit to who-ever authored the article that I am posting at my website in which ever fashion. Yes..that completely eliminates copyrighted material from any commercial pay-for-use websites like safari.oreilly.com....but that brings in every other blog that exists in the world. As time progresses, my site will be a storehouse of articles that I find interesting...and will be customized to me...and the population that shares the same interests as me.

One of the drawbacks to this approach is that if the original author makes any changes to his/her original article after I am done copying the content to my website....i will have an old copy...which I should take care to update....and here is where I guess trackbacks come in handy. Anyways... this idea is still vague in mind....and am yet to formalize a doc on this detailing more issues ..both good and bad.

I dont consider any copy-paste job to be an act of plagiarism if I dont take any credit for that article...and I give credit to that author in that view of the article. So... good for me...I get a complete list of what I need...hosted at my own website.....and so can everyone else.

The big question here is whats in it for the original author(s).... and alll I can think of now..is a few increased google rankings......(well..in all honesty....google rankings for my site also increase in the process)

So...well..thats an outline of my idea...so..go ahead....flame on !![:P]