Have you heard about reblogging, offered via wordpress.com blogs? This was news to me, although it has been out since 2010.

Apparently, if you use WordPress.com for your blog (meaning the blog is hosted on WordPress’ servers) and are signed in, you can “like” blog posts you read. The author is alerted – I assume only if the author, too, uses WordPress.com – and then you have the option to “reblog” the post onto your blog.

This will add the blog post title and a “snippet” of text plus a photo to your blog and link back to the original blog for the full version.

This is similar to how Tumblr functions, and is in the same spirit of “retweeting” for Twitter and the “share” feature for Facebook.

I had not heard about this until Vin at BierBattered.com asked to join our Complete List of Beer Blogs. We check out blogs to make sure they are truly blogs and, in the process, I noticed Vin had a sizable number of “reblogged” blog posts on his site.

Because there are sites out there that automatically pull entire blog posts from other blogs – mostly in an attempt to create an SEO-powerful site that can make advertising money at the expense of the original authors – we are leery of any copying that does not include the approval of the author. In this case, WordPress itself created reblogging and it only includes part of the text.

Check out Vin’s site, scroll down a bit, and you’ll see a number of reblogged entries, all in accordance with WordPress’ reblogging program. What do you think?