I've heard so much about original content v's duplicate content. If I publish an article (original) at my little website, I assume a day to two later Google will crawl the site and index that page. Say a week or two later I submit that article to various article sites. My question is, does Google consider the oldest date of submission as the original article, that being my little website.
no. It's way more complicated than that. Google's method for determining which is the most 'relevant' version of a dupe is a closely guarded secret, but you can bet your bottom dollar that backlinks / PR play a part. If it was just 'first come first served', then it would be random - when the googlebot found it and where. Which it manifestly isn't, of course. You can try to 'force' the bot to regard you as the definitive by only having that on your site, and releasing 'stripped down' versions elsewhere (hopefully with a backlink or two to the 'full' article) but you still have no real control over it.
I fully agree. I have faced the same problem many times. I write something on my blog/forum and after a few weeks someone puts the same article on google groups etc. My article gets thrown out of the results and the newer version starts showing. Then I submit that particular page to do-follow social bookmarking sites and my article again starts appearing in the results.
its actually pretty simple, the site with the best links / trust will rank highest. this is why Google recommend you always link back to yourself in syndicated content, to make sure you get the SERP not someone else. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
@OP: That's a good thought I don't think it's always 'one original'. Many times google will consider 2 or more sites as authoritative enough to include in their unfiltered results.