Ars Technica is really good at stealing other’s ideas. Plain and simple.

Anyone else, and I may have given them a pass that they came up with what seems to be the exact same approach to a story that I took last week. Not Ars Technica. They’ve done this before. To many people. Many times. I’m hardly the only one who has noticed it.

Last week, I saw Apple 2.0 writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt’s story that used a graphic of the world he found in The Mac Observer forums. I saw the map and thought of one thing: the game Risk. As such I wrote a short article on VentureBeat on Friday with that as the main crux: The iPhone is winning at the game of Risk.

Today, Sunday, 2 full days later, Ars Technica comes back with an article, with their own picture dubbed “iRisk.” The opening paragraph talks about how the map, which they made their own version since I’m sure they didn’t even both to ask the real map’s author permission to use his (which both Philip and I did), reminds them of the board game or world domination. I, naturally, don’t even get a link.

You may think, big deal, so you had the same idea. It’s bigger than that. Here is what I truly believe Ars does on a regular basis (and coincidentally, I’ve had this conversation with a few people right before this happened, and all three fully agreed.):

Ars sees a news story. They sit back for a few days and let everyone else weigh in. They take the best of those ideas and craft a post out of it. The stories often look well-crafted because of this. Many of them hit the frontpage of Digg (this one probably will too).

They wake up on third and everyone assumes they got a triple.

I’ve tried in the past to go about calling them out in a nicer way, but that time is over. I’m sure they’ll try to claim they didn’t see my story. Whatever. If this was just one or two or 12 incidents maybe I would buy that. I’m not buying it now. Ars Technica is bullshit.

[UPDATE]: Well the response to this has been huge to say the least. While some of the comments have been negative, the majority have been overwhelmingly positive.

Much more interesting however is the emails I’ve gotten. I’m not at liberty to share many of them, but lets just say A LOT of people, well respected and well placed people working in the industry out there have the exact same thoughts.

One message that is perhaps not so shockingly lacking is anything from Ars. I did notice that at least one of their writers started following me however on Twitter. I’ve been warned numerous times that they would try to come at me stating they are the AP or Reuters of the web, and that they aren’t a blog and don’t have to follow blogging standard practice. If that happens I’ll laugh and let you know.

[UPDATE 2]: (I wrote this in a comment below but figured I’d move it up here too)

Let me just be clear on something. The linking is really somewhat of a secondary issue here. I realize that Ars linked to Apple 2.0, as they should have. The issue is that Ars routinely takes other site’s angles on stories and writes them up as if they were their own.

Sure, linking is the way this is deemed acceptable – and I would not have complained if Ars had linked to me – but many splogs link too. The real issue is a larger one as I see it: Ars sitting around and waiting for other sites to write stories, then publishing their own a few days later with the very same ideas.

Yes, they may link to the originator of the news (from what I hear they’ve been told many times to do so and have gotten better at it), but they are very often not linking to those whose ideas about that news they take for their own.

Some of you seem to want to let them off the hook just because you see the presence of a hyperlink in their story.

[UPDATE 3]: In a comment on IP Democracy’s post on the matter, Ars is now saying they wrote their post on Friday but decided not to publish until Sunday. Okay, maybe next they’ll claim a timestamp of 12:01 if I say I wrote mine at 12:02.

Though I still have yet to hear from Ars, I’m seeing a lot of varying excuses from them on this matter via 3rd parties sending me info.

They can make excuses and claim ignorance all they want. The fact of the matter is that A TON of people have all recognized the exact same pattern of behavior from Ars, and instead of acknowledging it and attempting to do better, they make excuses and talk down to people. Again, bullshit.

[UPDATE 4]: And for the record here is the other site in question that talks about iPhone Risk. It is actually a really cool site, and one that I honestly didn’t see before it was in the comments. I wish I would have, I certainly would have linked to them. To that site: I’m sorry you got caught in the middle of this, but hope you’re getting some decent traffic.