While browsing an unusually large collection of RSS articles this morning I stumbled across this little doozy from the HowToGeek. Being a fan of keyboard shortcuts universally I immediately thought it was cool and tried it out in my copy of Office ‘07. It worked. Sweet!

Then about 5 minutes later, while reading the Lifehack feed, I found this article.

Wow! They’re almost exactly the same! The images are definintely from the same source, so there’s gotta be something going on here. Either…

1. Lifehack ripped off HowToGeek
2. HowToGeek ripped off Lifehack
3. Both Lifehack and HowToGeek ripped off someone else
4. They both used images from a known Office 2007 article which allows free use of the pictures therein

I don’t know which one of these is the case, but I don’t think it matters.

The point is this: so many sites are just constantly recycling and regurgitating the same information. I have quite a few feeds in my RSS subscription list, and the amount of content duplication is just incredible. Whatever happened to people writing their own content? What happened to “different site, different story”?

Reading stuff on the web is starting to become annoying. Bring back the days when there weren’t a million tumble blogs cranking out bzillions of stories that are the same as all the other blogs. Leave us with Engadget, BoingBoing and dzone and we’ll be happy.