First off, I am going to include the some thoughts from an e-mail my friend and colleague Alice Robison wrote to our department in response. I

 I think this speaks to a larger cultural issue that's becoming more and more important to those of us in academia and especially those of us who are interested in things like free culture, remixing, re-appropriating, etc. Plagiarism is less often the result of deliberate cheating (lots of research on this if you're interested) and more often the result of a lack of revision coupled with a lack of direct instruction on incorporating sources.

Alice also emphasized how hard it is write a proper paraphrase and pointed us in the direction of a great resource.

Really, it seems, it's about learning the rules. If I had-- with a little framing, attribution, and Alice's permission, just used the entire text her e-mail as a blog post, that probably would have been okay. But, if I were in a class and done the same as a response paper, it would not have been okay-- not plagiarism, exactly, but just relying too heavily on the ideas of another for that context.

Twitchell's act offends us because he should have known what is acceptable in academic writing and what isn't. If we believe that his faulty note-taking skills are to blame, he should have had better systems in place since his whole livelihood depends on his ability to participate in a formal conversation-in-writing? That is what scholarship is, essentially.

In my heightened state of attention to both academic blogs and citations, I noticed that academics have not settled on a uniform method of sourcing information in blogs. While most academics are content to use hyperlinks (the internet's own home-grown citation system) or indented quotes, Grant is careful to include a light but formal bibliography at the end of each post, even citing his own blog when he refers back to previous posts. Is a hyperlink enough? Should we include citations as well? What about if we site and not link? What are the standards this medium?

The reason for this lack of standardization, I think, has to do with the fact that no one is really sure what academic blogging is supposed to be.  In her discussion of academic blogging, Rochelle Rodrigo contrasts Henry's blog to Stephen King's columns at the back of Entertainment Weekly thus:

Henry Jenkins is blogging; and those blogs are easier reads than his scholarly articles and books. But I still can't watch The Tudors and read Jenkins' blog. I can, however, read Uncle Stevie (Stephen King's "The Pop of King" column in Entertainment Weekly), along with various technology blogs that keep me up on cool new techie-tools and toys I might incorporate into my teaching (LifeHacker, ReadWriteWeb, and Web Worker Daily to name a few).

Certainly, Grant's post are shorter than Henry's, and perhaps even more Tudors-able, but they are more traditional in their citation methods. So, what is an academic blog supposed to be? Should we be able to read an academic blog while watching TV? What kinds of methods are we supposed to be using? How formal should the writing and the style standards be?

But really, academic blogging is just an example. What other emerging forms of writing and other ways of assembling ideas in arguments do we need to develop ethical and professional standards for? How might they impact what we teach when teach writing, using sources, and revision?

Oh and somewhat tangentially--  Isn't it interesting that the internet, the very thing that so many have decried as the pleasure island of cut-and-paste plagiarism, was the means through which Twitchell was "outed"? Roy Rivenburg, a freelance writer, was googling key terms looking for an old story of his when he came across familiar bits in Twitchell's book.