Since the entire idea of writing online is producing your own content, blog plagiarism would seem a bit moronic. As any reader of Chilling Effects could tell you, this is not the case. I was reading a post on Weblog Tools Collection about a person offering to install WordPress blogs for others for free. It sounded like something I remembered reading a few weeks ago on another blog, maybe Photo Matt (although I think that post regarded a webhost offering free WordPress blogs). It seemed relatively mundane until I saw the redaction and the comment by Podz below.
Podz stated that the post by "Webmaster Mike" Atlan was contains text orginally found in a post on his own blog written yesterday. His story seems believable; Mike's blog seems very rough around the edges; the post in question is the only one that does not immediately seem like a test post. Podz' post also contains a hyperlink to the WordPress server requirements that Mike's post seems to be missing.
If the text was copied on purpose, one must wonder what Mike was thinking. His WordPress installation (which still includes the default layout and the default user name of "site admin") does not exactly inspire confidence in his abilities to install WordPress blogs on a vast variety of servers. Also, Podz' thoughts on the impossibility of going to sleep with uncovered feet are, in my opinion, far more interesting than his offer to install WordPress.
I am hoping that Mike (who has another blog, running Nucleus, with actual content) had no malicious intent. Perhaps he happened to copy some text randomly and post it. Or maybe he planned to take Podz up on his offer of technical support. I do not know, but for Mike's sake, I hope he has an explanation.
UPDATE: Mike responds; what was left of my faith in the human race is restored.
It appears that Mike has restarted his website - there are only two posts available now, a photograph and a weightloss advertisement. Perhaps you could update with a summary of his response?
The gist of his response was that he was looking for CSS styles on the Internet in order to change from the default style, and Podz' site was the first to come up. He did not explicitly state that he was only using Podz' content for testing, but he seemed surprised that Podz had found his site. Podz wrote another post about the issue, and Michael submitted a comment apologizing.
In a related note, when I switched web hosts a couple of months ago, I made the mistake of posting before the domain propagation had occurred, resulting in http:// 209.197.236.46/~dodoo/blog/ (I added a space so there would not be a hyperlink) being added to Google, Technorati, and a number of other sites, sometimes even displacing marteydodoo.com. Perhaps Pingomatic should be disabled by default in WordPress installations.
Thanks!