Unwritten rule #1 of blogging: link to your source. We caught CNET breaking the rule last month. (They actually agreed, and added a link.) Yesterday, MG Siegler thinks he caught Ars Technica:

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."

This case is in a gray area: it's not hard news, just one particular approach to a story.

A commenter is not so sure any copying was done:

You don't seem to be quite as original as you think you are, either. Some site called the iPhone Blog (which I found by Googling iPhone world domination risk after reading your piece) has been playing iPhone Risk --complete with stylized map-- since February, including an update with all this latest info on May 7. Could it be that you and Fortune ripped them off, or could it be that lots of people make the "entering new markets is kinda like Risk" association?

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/tag/iphone-risk/

Matthew Ingram got an explanation from Ars Technica's founder:

[Ken Fisher] said that Siegler wasn't the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk...and that therefore he didn't deserve a link ... Ars didn't see Siegler's post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).

An update to Siegler's post claims lots of support by email:

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.

But isn't that exactly the kind of (non) evidence that blogs are rightly skeptical about? Ars may well be a repeat offender, but until the evidence is out in the open, I'll stick with "innocent until proven guilty".