Bloggers' Plagiarism Scientifically Proven

XiceeX writes "Wired has up a story about HP, as part of a larger drive to figure out how ideas ideas 'infect' large groups of people, scientifically proving what most people already knew: bloggers steal their ideas from other bloggers."

duh.

And that last story about Microsoft cameras was stolen directly from Yahoo. FP

funny and insightful!

isn't that the purpose of the internet--interconnection? i look at various blogs not for news, but for filtered connections to stuff. "there is nothing new under the sun," as my grandfather used to say, and from an engineering/invention perspective this is very often the case. Nature is the most plagarized of all!

but it's my idea...

Re:funny and insightful!

"there is nothing new under the sun," as my grandfather used to say

Your Grandfather plagiarized that from the author of Ecclesiastes. [crosswalk.com]

How fitting ...

Re:funny and insightful!

What is the point of blogs though? I thought they were to convey some sense of individuality on the old interweb. Instead, in everyone's rush to be some kind of blog king, blogs are forcing people think and express themselves in the same way. Stealing someone's ideas means you can't or don't come up with your own.

Giving into the "nothing new under the sun" just means that if there is, it won't be from you.

It's not "stealing"

It's "sharing"

It's what Open Source is all about

t's what Open Source is all about: "sharing" other people's ideas and making sure they remain "shared".

Re:It's what Open Source is all about

"I'm pretty sure the overwhelming bulk of OSS is taking what has already been created in the proprietary world, emulating or outright copying it and then releasing it to everyone else as "free" software."

From my own experience, I've been working on my MP3 juke/server software Andromeda [turnstyle.com] since about 1999. A few years later some guy came up with a GPL'd app Zina (Zina is not Andromeda, which he describes: "It is similar to Andromeda, but released under the GNU General Public License"). And, in turn, I've seen others with forked versions of Zina.

So, I've certainly seen OS projects following a proprietary work, BUT I've also seen proprietary projects that follow other proprietary projects too.

Most ideas are part of a flow, and I don't think that I would characterize OS as any more or less derivative than proprietary work -- except when it comes to the endless GPL forking.

IMHO, the main problem with OS is that the coders aren't getting paid.

I have some ideas

About how ideas 'infect' large groups of people, scientifically proving what most people already knew: bloggers steal their ideas from other bloggers. I will post them shortly.

Re:I have some ideas

I think the false underlying assumptions here are that originality is always good and that if two people have the same idea one must have copied from the other.

The idea that copying is bad is a recent one. Prior to the industrial revolution the highest form of the craftsman's art was often considered to be the ability to create perfect copies of other people's work. Innovation is a relatively new idea. If you go to recently industrialized countries the bias for originality is often absent.

Several people have the same idea all the time. Whit Diffie was not the first to think up public key cryptography, but nobody claims he copied it off Cocks at GCHQ. I often take apart other people's schemes and find they have had ideas that are similar to my own.

Invention is not just originality, it is also reuse of existing ideas, improving where necessary and useful. In many case it is the circumstances that lead to the result.

Take a look at the Cagle cartoons on Slate. They have all the editorial cartoons from 40 odd papers across the country. The number of times that the same cartoon idea appears again and again is uncanny. These people might be copying to a small extent, but it simply isn't possible for them to all come out with the same idea in such a short time.

I am probably not the only person who thinks that the latest '24x7' hunt for Bin Laden is something we should have been doing for the past two years. If you read the blogs you will find page after page of people outraged that the start of the hunt for Bin Laden seems to have been timed to coincide with the first Bush election ads. I doubt many of them have seen my slashdot .sig. Clearly much of this is independent thought.

Blogs are an entertainment and a political movement. They are not academic journals or treatises. Not that there is much of importance or originality in the academic litterature. Sure people lift ideas but thats why most people are putting them out there.

For years people have been asking if I am angry that Microsoft has copied many of my ideas. Oddly enough nobody has ever asked me if I minded other people copying my ideas (and passing them off as their own which Microsoft has never done), but that is another story. The fact is that I want people to use my ideas, they are useless unless they are put into action. Microsoft use a lot of my ideas because I spend a lot of time persuading them to use them. My principal complaint about Netscape is that they just shut themselves off from the Web community, they got the idea that they were the only people who had the good ideas.

Ideas are easy

It's implementing them that is difficult...

Which is why patents should only be granted the demonstration of a working example...

Re:It's not "stealing"

It's not stealing if you don't sell it. It's like punching someone in the dark - it's a victimless crime.

straw men, yay!

The title of this Slashdot story, as well as most of the comments, have missed the point.

I spoke with Lada Adamic Wednesday, and she gave a talk on this and several other of her research directions. They are not out to determine whether people plagiarize. They are interested in information flow within complex networks. That is to say, if I want to find good information, where should I look? The typical answer has been "those who agglomerate".

It is no surprise to the HP group or anyone that some information sources are simply aggregating agents. But if your area of research is information flow in complex networks, this type of study contains many insights. For example, a common question is "what information nodes are important?". This study seeks to look beyond the naive answer "high-degree nodes" and attribute some importance, in an informational sense, to lower-degree nodes that act as sources for the network.

The iRank scheme mentioned several times in the article, which I read, demonstrates this thrust. A scheme like PageRank will almost always rank most highly the aggregates, because they are highest-degree in terms of backlinks. But who is to say that such a ranking is optimal? If you care about quickly scanning much information, it probably is. But if you care about seeking more detailed or perhaps more well-informed sources of information on a topic, iRank may well be a closer-to-optimal scheme.

The comments regarding this story have been a straw man excercise if i've ever seen one on Slashdot. HP doesn't spend its research money to find out that some information sources gather information from many others and distribute it widely. It does spend its money to find out more about how complex networks operate and how the flow of information can be analyzed and exploited to improve query responses in those networks.

Bad writers plagiarize?

I would have never guessed!

In other news, sixth-graders routinely hand in articles copied verbatim from the World Book Encylopedia as "research papers".

Re:Bad writers plagiarize?

FUCK! How did you know? Mrs. Wiens, wherever you are, I'm sorry!!!

wait

Isn't that google search for Miserable Failure [google.com] enough of an example?

Few Original Ideas

...bloggers steal their ideas from other people.

I've found that there are very few original thoughts or ideas, and very few people who come up with them. It isn't a matter of plagerism. It's just that there are only so many viable ideas out there. And the more that are already taken, the harder it is to come up with a new one. If you reach too far just to have an original thought, then you end up a wacko.

It isn't just bloggers.

Re:Few Original Ideas

I do support plagiarism in one area: spelling. Please grab a dictionary and look up plagiarism. It's not spelled plagerism. Thanks.

Re:Few Original Ideas

I don't agree that there are "few original ideas" or there is "nothing new under the Sun". However, there are few original thinkers.

If memory serves, a 19th century sociologist by the name of "Darde" posited that out of 100 people, 1 is truly creative and the remaining 99 are echoic.

The research in question suggests the same. And so does the nature of television.

Re:Few Original Ideas

If memory serves, a 19th century sociologist by the name of "Darde" posited that out of 100 people, 1 is truly creative and the remaining 99 are echoic.

So I guess we can rule you out of the 1% too?

(Sorry, couldn't resist.) ;-)

Re:Few Original Ideas

If memory serves, a 19th century sociologist by the name of "Darde" posited that out of 100 people, 1 is truly creative and the remaining 99 are echoic.

Hence the rest of us peons are reduced to recycling the wisdom of long-dead academics. (get it?)

Actually I mostly agree. Except I think everybody is at least slightly original, just to different degrees. Even Einstein's work wasn't a total discontinuity out of the blue.

I like to rank originality, at least in science, by the number of years I guess it would have taken for the thing to be invented anyways, if the original inventor had not. The TV, for instance, was a virtual tie among several people.

Back in the dark ages there weren't too many scientists and it was relatively easy to move a discovery up by 100 years IMHO. Nowadays so many people are working every problem that it's harder to jump ahead even by 1-2 years.

Re:Few Original Ideas

Right. It's also basic human nature. You know how there are some people who have great personalities, who speak like it is really them talking, who, while they are almost certainly not 100% original, still give that impression? Then, there are people who seem to have half a personality, who parrot excessively, who, when you're having a conversation with them, they keep picking up words you use and throwing them back at you, and you notice because it's mildly odd. Or maybe you overhear them repeating an idea that you know you formulated, but they're repeating it to somebody else and taking the credit.

It seems to me that this article is merely pointing out that a lot of people are like the latter. I'm also not surprised to find lots of these types of people among bloggers, since so many are overt attention ho's, and attention ho's are often notorious "borrowers" of other people's personalities.

(Mind, I'm not saying this of all bloggers, as I have found plenty of interesting, well-written, informative, and entertaining blogs. You know the kind I'm talking about.)

Re:Few Original Ideas

I've found that there are very few original thoughts or ideas, and very few people who come up with them. It isn't a matter of plagerism. It's just that there are only so many viable ideas out there. And the more that are already taken, the harder it is to come up with a new one. If you reach too far just to have an original thought, then you end up a wacko.

Interesting, as I've found that there are very few original thoughts or ideas, and very few people who come up with them. It isn't a matter of plagerism. It's just that there are only so many viable ideas out there. And the more that are already taken, the harder it is to come up with a new one. If you reach too far just to have an original thought, then you end up a wacko.

Bloggers

Of course, this begs the question.. Why are the popular bloggers popular if other bloggers are thinking these ideas up first?

I think it's the fact that the more popular bloggers put their ideas across in a clearer way than the less know bloggers..

it's not the idea that's important.. it's how you present it.

Simon.

Aggregators

One reason is that good bloggers who don't have many original thoughts are good aggregators. They may or may not state the ideas in a clearer fashion. But they know what people are interested in and bring it together. That's one reason /. is popular. It's a collection of information you'd have to go to hundreds of other places to find yourself.

Re:Bloggers

What does "beg the question" mean, anyway? [strongbrains.com].

Look! I'm linking to a blog in a discussion about blogs!

Isn't that ironic [reference.com]?

No, in fact it is not.

look no further

The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.

Otherwise know as the 'Slashdupe' syndrome. One site is even know for it's inability to keep stories original within a 24 hour period.

In other news...

And another thing:

Wired [wired.com] has up a story [wired.com] about HP, as part of a larger drive to figure out how ideas ideas 'infect' large groups of people, scientifically proving what most people already knew: bloggers steal [hp.com] their ideas from other bloggers.

Well that explains that!

So that's why all the whiny angsty poetry on blogs looks the same...it IS the same!
/hates whiny teenage blogs

Steal?

But, but, how can an idea be stolen? Isn't the whole point that ideas are supposed to be valueless since they can be copied effortlessly?

Yes, horrible plagiarism!

Idea theft?

You don't say!

I suppose we're going to start burning Shakespeare's works because they were blatantly stolen from other writers, right?

Idea modification and adaptation is not plagiarism - much of human progress in the arts has happened because of this phenomenon, and the internet neither started nor ended it.

Re:Yes, horrible plagiarism!

The problem lies in the fact that the 21's century is the century of "MINE MINE GIMMIE GIMMIE!" where it's profitable to try and protect that which was traditionally openly shared over the past 5000 years.

computers would be nothing like they are today (nor as cheap as) if it wasnt for "stealing" and "plagiarism" My god, Compaq stile IBM's IP and shout be punished severly! OMG! Texas Instruments STOLE the idea of a processor from Intel!

today too many people are worrying about how to make the most money with the least effort..

How about being proud of the fact that your idea is so good that everyone want's to copy it? and use that supposedly superior brain to tink up another one...

that is why every "invention" I come up with I market the hell out of until I see copies show up on the market, then simply switch to something else after selling the rights cheaply to one of the copycats. (no I wont tell any of you what items I invented, many are gizmos for hunters and camping/hiking)

The louder someone whines about stolen

So...

So it's only one person's cat who did "the most amazing thing today" and only one person's friend "acted like my friend but was really just a big bitch all along" and everyone else is just copying? Oh to find that cat...

Next Question...

... is slashdot considered a blog?

If so, its quite well known it links to copyrightten articles all the time.

Obviously

with four-hundred and eighty-nine quintillion-zillion blogs, how many did they think were going to be original?

Generally stealing ideas is good for growth

I think generally "stealing" gives high growth rates. In medieval times people were stealing ideas easily - this led to renaissance, arts and science as we know them were born. Scientists "steal" ideas - they modify other's ideas. This is how the progress works. Patents that would prevent any "stealing" like the last try from NEC on idea of nanotubes, not some way of making them is against progress. Perhaps you disagre...

Depends really

I mean my blog is more like an online journal of what I've been up to and been thinking about. It's very rare that I post memes or links to "popular" sites (though it does happen occassionally).

I guess in this case they're referring to bloggers as people who blog lots of links. Maybe they're the majority of bloggers, but they're not the majority of *interesting* bloggers (imho!)

That's not just blogs...

It's also how news spreads. Afterall, Slashdot is very rarely the first to report a story, it just links to somebody else who has posted information on a topic. From there, several other media outlets see the story on Slashdot and therefore report on it themselves.

Lobachevski

Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it, pliz, 'research'.

Shamelessly researched from a Tom Lehrer song.

Self-Pleasure Circuit

Has anyone else ever noticed how much blogs just reference eachother and talk about how amazing blogs are, while not really doing anything all that insightful or significant? Most of the time they just keep posting the same old thing you saw on that other guy's blog, while offering nothing new.

I'm just suprised that this whole fad has lasted this long.

Let's be realistic here. The scripting ability necessary to create a weblog is next to nil. It's not that amazing of a thing. It's a nice format, I'll give you that, but it doesn't deserve the hype. It's just about time that people start noticing this and pointing out the vapidity in the 'blogging scene'.

Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit

Oh please get off your high horse. I know exactly what you're saying, these things are pretty self-indulgent but so is posting on /. for the most part. Blogs are entertainment for many people, and there's a good reason for it. Blogs are free to read, often have discussions associated with them, and touch on subjects that mass media just don't bother with (because they are trivial in a world sense). Personally I'd like to see this "fad" become a norm. People sharing stories and information is not a common thing these days! We all get our information from "trusted" media sources, and then talk about it the next day. What's so wrong with deciding what we think is important, posting it on our own blog, and generating our own discussion on it?

And as far as your comment on the simplicity of the scripting required, that's just snobbery. I'll bet your design and scripting skills are miles further ahead than those of most bloggers, but so what? How is that relevant?

There is vapidity everywhere these days from TV, to movies, to music, even to the bloody news! Something as simple and community oriented as a blog does not deserve to be passed off as insignificant and vapid. The content is not necessarily as important as the medium. Blogs are part of our modern oral tradition, and from a sociological standpoint they're extremely relevant and important media.

Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit

Let's be realistic here. The scripting ability necessary to create a weblog is next to nil.

Your point being? People don't read blogs because they're hard to set up: they read them because they (presumably) find the writer interesting.

So?

The mainstream news media has been reduced to parroting press releases from any group whatsoever and calling it "reporting" for years now.

Just yesterday I heard a radio news story about how thousands of people are dying from something or other every year. When I looked into the data deeper, it was an estimate (read: ideologically motivated wild ass guess) by some political group, and had no actual science behind it whatsoever. But it was still just reported without any thought because the group issued a press release.

Sounds more like transient social consciousness

OK, I actually read the article and this doesn't sound like "stealing" at all to me. Granted we'd need to see the underlying blogs and topics in question, but let's face it - social awareness of various topics ebb and flow.

Those of you who follow U.S. media may recall "The Summer of the Shark". There was no peak in shark attacks that year. In fact I think it was a below-average year. It just became the socially-focused topic.

Then there's the "everything's now in place" effect. Competing teams coming up with similar vaccines at the same time. Or manned flight.

Just part of the Great Filtered Aquifer of the human experience.

Of course it may well be that humans are just a bunch of damn thieving cheaters. ;-)

Blog tracking services

I'm surprised there are not blog-rating/tracking services that watch this kind of phenomenon. One could even do side-by-sides of how different blogs reported/copied material on a given topic. Different blogs might become known for originality of new ideas, while others might become known for long-term insightful commentary on copies of other blogs.

Routine tracking of blatant, unacknowledged copying of other's blogs would certainly separate the poseurs from the thinkers. Tracking the provenence of ideas would also reduce the truth-by-repetition problem on the internet wherein an erroneous fact looks widely accepted due to mere duplication.

But...

...that is so untrue! I just copied and pasted your "news story" into my blog so I could tell everybody about it and how wrong you are.