A few pithy quotes does not original content make

PlagarismToday makes a point that has been a beef of mine for a while with the blogosphere:

These sites, which for this article I'll simply call "gray", are generally identified by a large number of very short posts, with much of it in block quotes or otherwise directly lifted content. Though they meticulously credit their sources, bowing to more traditional rules for blog attribution, and work to add at least some original content, usually over half of their material comes from other sources.

This has caused many bloggers to worry that these grey blogs might be trying to get away with content theft under the guise of legitimate attribution. The idea being that they can create a much larger volume of content if they only have to write a small portion of it. Users will simply visit the gray blogs since they are able to provide so much more information and, due to the use of liberal quoting, the user will then have no reason to visit the original source. After all, they already have most of the critical information.

Don't worry, the writer doesn't call for a major attack on bloggers or anything like that, but he or she has a very good point about the extent of bloggers often taking a significant amount of material from others and reusing it as their own or almost their own. Usually it's several paragraphs with one or two sentences. It's not a problem with a lot of blogs, like your average Blogger user because they don't have ads, nor do they have such a critical base of readers that it's likely to take away much (or anything) from the original writer. Yet, I frequently see bigger bloggers who quote liberally and rarely write up large amounts of their own content filled with their own ideas.
Is plagarism too harsh of a term for it? Probably, but there is something to the idea that bloggers need to write more of their own content. I have about 60-70 pages worth of original fiction content that I have published on my blog, though with full copyright reserved on it. I would be very annoyed with anyone who copied and pasted the bulk of it over onto their blog if they didn't give my blog a prominent citation at the top of the post. By the way, that's the reason that when I quote something like this PlagarismToday article, I tend to put the link to the citation at the top of the page, rather than the bottom.

You don't have to be original. God knows that the average political blogger thinks very neatly inside the political box just like the mainstream media does. It wouldn't be worth talking about, were it not for the fact that many bloggers want to be considered journalists. I know I'm not a journalist, but many bloggers don't understand that they aren't journalists. The blogosphere feeds off of the products of the mainstream media, which is why we need to respect their copyrights better. We have every right to make fair use quotations to formulate responses, rebuttals, agreements, etc., but just cutting and pasting content is amateur hour Google News. How many Instapundit-type aggregators do we really need?