Not from attribution.
Wired News: Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious
Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution.
Just watch - I'll bet this article shows up on the a-list (oops, sorry, non-existent a-list) soon. Those thieving bastards!
Comments
El Whiner beat you by 35 minutes, dude.
I wish Michael over on Slashdot had framed this as something besides "plagiarism," because that makes it too easy to brush off.
It'd be cool if more people more readily attributed the source of their linkage, but that conflicts with one of the tonal centerpieces of a lot of those blogs, which involves convincing the reader that they're really that tied in to the pulse of the web.
Funny to me, because the last major site I ran (linuxtoday) had a fairly conscientious policy of mentioning where we saw links until a perception developed at levels above the editorial group that we risked our go-to status by acknowledging that our derivative product was, well, derivative on a second level. So away went the "via" links in an attempt to de-democratize the flow of information by hiding our best sources away from the readers. Silly. They weren't coming to the site in hopes of figuring out how to duplicate the efforts of a full-time staff, they were coming because we had a full-time staff to look that stuff up for them. Looks like that sin is being repeated among people who insist they're agents of openness vs. the top-down Old Media culture.
Posted by: mph | March 5, 2004 1:36 PM