Is comment free?

The Guardian has a slogan online: "comment is free". Too true. I've noticed, lately, that sometimes articles appear (in print) in The Guardian, and other papers, a few days after the same ideas, even phrases, and images, have circulated, freely, in (on?) the blogosphere - including, a few times, at Eyewear.

Most recently, today, columnist Mark Lawson has a piece on the poet laureate, referencing John Sergeant, Obama (not normally two subjects linked, I'd have thought) and other comments that strongly echo my post of a few days back on the same subject. Coincidence? Surely.

However, bloggers are doing a lot of the unpaid gruntwork these days, it seems to me, for the "professional" media commentariat, and, since we all know (from plagiarism cases on campus) that "Googling" can get results, fast, it is surely time that some credit is due, when whole arguments or themes are lifted, verbatim, from popular blogs.