Recycling in Action: Dale Caught Fencing Stolen Images

"Hello, hello, hello. What's all this then?" Is it: "Bang to rights officer. I'll come quietly." Sadly no. Having been rumbled coming late to the party with a Cllr Kerron Cross story, he's only 'ad it away with this one from Recess Monkey!

Both these blogs are in what used to be called his "Daily Reads", now renamed "Favourites". And in time honoured tradition Dale claimed he hadn't read these blogs - for several weeks in the case of our favourite parliamentary primate - and to have got it off a man down the pub received the story in an email. "I never knew if was hooky officer! Honest guv! Don't you know who I am?"

In a controlled though not especially scientific experiment earlier this week Labour of Love carefully selected a Dale-come-lately story, with no attribution for his source whatsoever, instead linking directly to an exclusive story from the Italian uber blogger and comedian Beppe Grillo.

This story had already got almost 100 Technorati citations over just an hour or so short of three days (it was I think published at 2:33pm local time, 12:33 pm our time? on 21/11). It now stands at 150. Incidentally in comments at his post Mr Dale claimed the story had only been up for "two days" before his story, published at 11:34 pm on 24/11. Classic bad arithmetic.

Not wanting to cut off the flow of hits to the original story I did not run a long quotation that could act as a spoiler as Iain did, but just a link and what I thought would be some intriguing information about the blogger and his rather progressive comment policy.

And despite knowing about all the previous links I wilfully followed Iain's example, linking only to Beppe's original and not to one of a score of English language blogs who had caught the wave before Iain and myself.

Predictably enough the very first comment after I published my post was from one of Mr Dale's sock puppets "Father Ted" accusing me, (ME!) of running the post without a hat tip to Iain Dale. I laughed out loud. Really, I did.

Searching Mr Dale's blogroll one finds that Beppe Grillo is not there. And searching Mr Dale's archive one finds that this is the very first mention for Mr Grillo. And also that silly "two days" claim.

The same goes for mine before you ask.

So, where did Iain find the story? Was this a genuine albeit very late Dale discovery? Perhaps it was. But as Iain is building up such a track record for not acknowledging sources few serious people can believe him when he claims self-righteously and at very great length that all is "tickety boo officer".