It’s a coincidence. Probably just a coincidence, right?

There’s a Tumblr blog that is run by an person who makes her living as an actress and comedian in LA. I posted something a few weeks ago about something somewhat obscure, and a couple days later she posted a short Tumblr about the same subject.

I don’t know this person at all, but we have a couple mutual online friends in the Twitter/Facebook/blog world, but that’s it. I’d be hardpressed to prove that she or any of these mutual cohorts would even want to read the Hamblog.

To be clear, the item that I posted was on this blog, not on my auxillary Hambox Tumblr blog (where “all the runty snippets that are too small and weak to become blog posts” live). If she had just reblogged an item on Tumblr, the attribution would have automatically gone to me.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. I’m chalking it down to coincidence, at this point, but will probably keep an eye on her future posts for a while, just to see if there is indeed a more direct connection between she and me.

Even if my tiny hunch turns about to be true, there’s nothing nefarious about this. If she had seen my link and decided to alert her readers about it, that is not nefarious either, although attribution would have been nice. If she had cut and pasted my own writing, that would’ve been totally nefarious.

[I like “nefarious!”]

I do run a plagiarism scan on the blog from time to time, just to make sure no one is lifting huge chunks of my extreme high-quality scribbling and calling it their own, but that’s about all the concern I can muster.

Besides, I’ve got that © sign at the bottom of every page of my website, doesn’t that encase me in a comfy cloak of invincibility? Right?

What’s your take on people using the internet as a “Free! Take one!” bin? What’s the solution?

Oh, you might want to revisit this somewhat related post, a mildly amusing 21st Century tale.