I have a question regarding articles and blogs; say I write an article on "Five Benefits of Widgets", with five distinct paragraphs on each of the joys of widgets. As I'm a lazy git, rather than re-spinning the whole article for publishing on my blog, I instead use each of the five paragraphs as is as five individual articles. Will this fall under Duplicate Content? I suspect not, but I thought I'd ask. That brings me to another question: are five short articles better than one long one for long tail issues? I suspect the answer is "it depends", but...
If the sites you are putting your article on are all yours and would like to promote one further, you might even say here is the full article and link to it from all others. That way, SEs know to put a higher importance on the one that you are linking to and in most cases, this won't count as duplicate content. Even if it is one paragraph, copyscape would catch it. But I don't know what the implications are as far as SEs are concerned.