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Bloggers' Plagiarism Scientifically Proven
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Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.
wait (Score:4, Interesting)
Generally stealing ideas is good for growth (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends really (Score:3, Interesting)
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!)
Self-Pleasure Circuit (Score:4, Interesting)
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'.
Blog tracking services (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
and the gratuitous repost (Score:3, Interesting)
The higher-posted comment gets "insightful" and "interesting" mods, while the lower post gets "redundant" mods, regardless of the fact that the lower comment was posted first.
I think the Slashtrolls have turned this technique into an online sport.
Re:Few Original Ideas (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
They don't copy ... (Score:2, Interesting)
If Shakespeare were a blogger (Score:3, Interesting)
Did I just write "But if Shakespeare were a blogger..."? Wow, that's a first...
Ideas are easy (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is why patents should only be granted the demonstration of a working example...
Re:Bloggers (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, it's a matter of gathering the interesting ideas. There are a lot of things being said - if someone can put together the most interesting things that's worth a lot. What I looked for in the Wired article (but never came to) was a mention of whether the blogs that they claimed were "plagiarized" came up with the interesting ideas repeatedly, or if they were one-offs. If so, you can't expect people to link to them, but it's wise to link to the best aggregators.
Re:Bloggers (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it doesn't. Do you even know what that means?
I am shocked, shocked. (Score:5, Interesting)
Large "establised" "media" outlets, such as Wired, NYT, "Rooters", etc., etc. need readers to sell either their content or their ads or both. Pushing their bias and ideology is a desireable plus.
Bloggers provide a complete spectrum of viewpoints. They do this usually for free, some of them have a tip jar. Sure, there are some stupid blogs about fur balls under the bed, but I am talking about serious bloggers here.
Here is the key: In many cases, bloggers have pointed out gross errors, plain lies, and other biases in "established" "media", which in the case of NYT has resulted in "corrections", where the NYT web page is changed quietly.
Make no mistake, bloggers are a threat to big "media", to the control and the monopoly on the distribution and spin of information that the "media" has enjoyed for decades.
Expect to see more big "media" outlets assuring you that bloggers are boring/venal/stupid/Republican, steal all their ideas, and put puppies thru blenders*.
Nothing to see here, Citizen, move along.
*bonus points to the first 3 million people who get the "puppy blender" ref.
It's ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
Plagiarism? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's good manners to provide a linkback to the blog you got the link from originally, but omitting it is hardly plagiarism. (A word which the article never uses, incidentally. I'm not on the hate-michael bandwagon, but that blurb headline has some nasty spin.)
-Carolyn
Re:Bloggers (Score:2, Interesting)
Huge Potential in Memetic Tracking (Score:3, Interesting)
! This is on the verge of being able to semantically track information flow between people... with the Internet, tracking like this is made possible which can show evidence for so many fascinating kinds of socioinformational phenomena. We're not just talking about quizzes here, we're talking about actual ideas.
This is evidence of a massive unconscious distributed process, which is indeed akin to the physics of a disease epidemic. The idea is seeded somewhere, and it is passed along through the social network, each person considering it and modifying it slightly, processing it more and more as it propagates. Think of it as evolutionary telephone - a mechanism for knowledge purification.
I have noticed myself that interactions with other people have a huge effect on the particular directions my own thoughts take... and, in fact, many of my own ideas are the result of conversations such as these. In a conversation, you are forced to express your ideas, to solidify its form within the structure of language. And then it can be manipulated and communicated and corrected: it is allowed to be processed further and percolated through society.
This is most wonderful stuff.
Reminds me of a book... (Score:3, Interesting)
funny and insightful! (Score:4, Interesting)
but it's my idea...
Re:CNN? FoxNews? NYTimes? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder how much different blogs are in this respect than "traditional" journalism.
Not very, from what I can see. And, I think, for the same reason: they all read each other's stuff.
The nice thing about blogs is that they'll call each other out on errors. You won't see the Wall Street Journal run a correction on something the New York Times wrote (even when Jason Blair happened, the NYT did the bulk of the reporting.)
The downside of blogs is that they're like HyperCard Stacks: Anyone can write one, but it takes talent and effort to write one well.
email tracking (Score:2, Interesting)
Uh, yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
As to the latter bullet: This happens ALL THE TIME in the age of electronic media, and the only way to prove it is to copy-paste a "snapshot" of what the article looked like at a given point in time before some editor does a hackjob on the original article because its slant was doubleplusungood.
So I'm providing a public service to my many readers, all 50 or so of them. Thbbbbbt!
Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's what Open Source is all about (Score:2, Interesting)
That is what the GPL is about.
BSD is about sharing and not looking for anything in return.
Re:Few Original Ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Aggregators (Score:2, Interesting)
In the language of Information Retrieval measurements, with precision and recall, we see that single sources have high precision (high quality), but low recall (talking only about themselves.) A site that points to everyone else has low precision but high recall. So the best sites would be those with a good balance of precision and recall (an f-measure). This is simply a technical way of saying your point again: good sites are high-quality aggregators.
memes and zeitgeist (Score:3, Interesting)
The collection of memes defining a culture, an era, and a place is the Zeitgeist. It is interesting to look at other Zeitgeists to see what people took for granted compared what believe now. Future cultures will be amused by our own Zeitgeist too.
self mapping meme (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's what Open Source is all about (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not plagiarism (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't steal what is freely given. The distinction between quoting with and without attribution, which you fail to make, is also important. Much of what's written on blogs is deliberately put into the public domain, with a clear desire on the authors' part to see it get broader distribution. Many bloggers obsessively track who's linking or responding to them, or how they stand on the various blogger rankings, or where they are on Google's list of hits for particular pet terms. It's a universal enough phenomenon that it's the exceptions - the people who do not want their material used elsewhere - who should be required to identify themselves. The default assumption, which mirrors copyright law, should be that if someone made a concrete effort to publish and didn't make an effort to limit the scope of that publication then it's public domain.
Re:"Plagiarism" (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you sure that the right use of the word? A plagiarist is someone who copies wholesale, words and paragraphs not belonging to him. A plagiarist exploits people who attribute depth to some idea, but short-circuits the thought processes that went into creating the idea. Instead the plagiatist copies.
Plagiarism is trying to pass off someone else's work as your own. Other than that, I agree with you.
Re:Few Original Ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
Notions have to be tested by application or creative misapplication. There's a certain prestige associated with showing good taste in your choosing what memes you "echo". There's a strong trace of that in blogging.
It's interesting to consider humour memes, that is little bits of "humour" creativity (quirks, expressions, situations) that are widely echoed by television viewers. For example, several Seinfeld memes (as in "Moops") are still circulating. But a humour meme, unlike a physical invention, once "tested" and "approved" is dead when it has circulated widely and been repeated enough not to produce laughter anymore.
Then 20 years later, the memes can be re-circulated (That 70s Show) for new profit. In my experience, machines don't have this virtue. (My TRS-80 is long gone!)
Less creative television and movies resort to "jolts per minute". We could also call this "weak memes per minute". An actor celebrated for his weak-meme work can pursue a career as Governor. ;^)
Re:funny and insightful! (Score:5, Interesting)
Giving into the "nothing new under the sun" just means that if there is, it won't be from you.
Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit (Score:2, Interesting)
A thousand years from now when the Archeologists dig up the LiveJournal servers and figure out how to extract the information from them, they're going to be ecstatic - one of the hardest aspects of human history to learn anything about is the mundane, day to day detail of a person's life. Not very many people write that kind of stuff down. Or at least they didn't. Sure people kept diaries but it's not quite the same as a public journal and certainly not as widespread.
So yes, I agree with you completely, being a bit of a History junkie.
Re:Bad writers plagiarize? (Score:3, Interesting)
Edgar Allan Poe... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/works/criticis/to
(first few lines)
Not for individuality... (Score:3, Interesting)
In a society where small communities are nonexistent, I think blogs are filling a void. That void is a result of the changing world; before there were cars, globalization, et. al., we used to live in very close-knit societies where everyone knew everyone else, as well as everyone else's business.
Channel for (mis)information (Score:3, Interesting)
Such an understanding is also important to marketers, who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most influential people in a given group.
Note that this also means that FUD can be spread in the same way. Suppose you want to do a pump-and-dump scheme. If you can deceive an influential blogger or two, then you've gained yourself a lot of ground for a relatively small amount of effort.
Knowing who the most influential individuals are for a particular topic is extremely valuable for both good and bad information!
They evalatute the merit of the ideas similarly (Score:1, Interesting)
The stereotypical blogger is a early to mid 20-something, technically inclined, college student or college graduate, and compared to mainstream america is radically liberal in his, her, or its politics.
Of course they associate themselves with similar expressions of ideas! They do so because they evaluate the merit of this ideas similarly.
I happen to disagree with "them" tremendously. I despise middle-class, pseudo-intellectual elitists. So many of them have yet to move beyond the stage of intellectual development we might describe as, "my self identity is that I am not like my parents, not a product of a tradition, and different then the 'mainstream.'" Yes, that may be well and good, but it is pitiful that these people fail to move past the stage of intellectual development of a whiny, rebelious teenager.
But nonetheless, I don't see why we should possibly think it is "wrong" to express association to similar ideas in a community of agreement. That's what makes a community after all!
Re:Bloggers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Steal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, an idea cannot be "stolen", unless it's so sophisticated that the owner has to keep it all on paper instead of inside the cerebellum. Copyright/patent infringement happens when someone takes advantage of the use value without compensating the legal "owner" for the idea's sale value. The owner still has the idea to use for himself, but the sale value of his "property" is diminished.
Hope that confuses you further.