Ben Werdmuller has some excellent, coherent thoughts about what writers need to thrive independently and as part of a network. I particularly like the idea of a newsletter-based blogroll, so that if you decide to follow me, you can also sign up to follow people I follow. This could indeed foster increased readership. No idea how hard it would be to build. Mind you, I'm still too scared of losing readers to even offer paid subscriptions.

Very interesting post showing just how blunt an instrument iThenticate is for uncovering actual plagiarism. 

[N]ot one single match that iThenticate had found amounted to illegitimate copying. In the end, my dissertation’s fraud factor had dropped from 74 percent to zero.

Will anyone else do the work to ensure that, for example, copied words are from publications before the target document, or are not part of the bibliography, or are not properly attributed quotations?