Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the we-prefer-to-say-'borrow' dept.
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."
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.
--
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Re:Few Original Ideas
by
Dystopian+Rebel
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
-- Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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.
Yes, horrible plagiarism!
by
musingmelpomene
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
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)
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...
That's not just blogs...
by
LostCluster
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
It's what Open Source is all about
by
Chemisor
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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
by
NDPTAL85
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
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.
Of course SOME actual innovation occurs but its very very minor.
-- Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
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.
-- ---
Ban humanity.
Aggregators
by
truthsearch
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
CNN? FoxNews? NYTimes?
by
ubiquitin
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I wonder how much different blogs are in this respect than "traditional" journalism. Newspapers have to make efforts at times to ensure that they don't have the exact same headline. Also, it probably isn't too terribly suprising that in a world of mass-media, the collective consciousness is a bit hard to redirect. Mass-originality and memes are opposite concepts.
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.
Now if someone reads about an idea, digests it, and is able to communicate the idea BETTER, is that plagiarism?
What is it with you slashdotters? You seem to have a grade school understanding of ideas and plagiarism. Have you ever seen DIFFERENT WORDINGS of the same idea? Have you ever seen DIFFERENT IDEAS worded similarly? Have you ever taken an undergraduate philosophy class? Until you can tell those situations apart and come up with a nuanced opinion, please learn not to label such things as plagiarism. It's akin to calling a flirt a rapist, or a lab mouse a rat.
I don't plagiarize...
by
Zarf
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm merely standing on the shoulders of a bunch of other midgets. We can see nearly as high as those who stand on the shoulders of giants... it just takes more of us and a little bit more walking.
And the few times I actually RTFA I usually find that the Slashdot summary--with no quote marks--is copied verbatim from an opening paragraph of the article.
Bloggers are just information aggregators. They cull from their sources and post the interesting stuff. Slashdot's been doing it for years. There's too much on the web, and Bloggers act as (real, not top 40) DJs by selecting the best of what's out there and giving it a better. No one seems to complain that DJs don't end every song with "I heard that album from my friend Ted."
The service they provide is going through hundreds of bad links to find the interesting ones to recommend to their readers. I think this report is simply stating the obvious.
Also, if this is a big deal, why doesn't Slashdot include a "via" field for submissions to give credit to where the poster found the link? Personally, I always give credit for links when the site I found the link from supports TrackBack, any other times it's a crapshoot.
-- Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit
by
addie
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
"Stealing" an Idea?!
by
sabat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This just goes to show how fucked up we've become.
If I, blogger, quote someone else, even unattributed, or talk about someone else's idea, that's "theft?" Gimme a break. You don't automatically own ideas just because you write them down.
You can't really "own" an idea anyway -- there's no US constitutional provision for that, just an allowance for a limited monopoly to encourage more creation.
Blogs are, by definition, a conversation. Calling that conversation "theft" is ridiculous to an extremem. What, if I'm talking to someone IRL, should I force them to "license" my ideas before continuing?
"Sorry, before we can continue, please sign here and pay this fee. Then we can keep talking about my ideas about how to set up a new centralized login server."
-- I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Re:"Stealing" an Idea?!
by
Zarf
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree that you can't really own an idea. But our problem is this: A song is essentially and idea, a business is essentially the execution of a collection of ideas, a story is an idea, a government is the execution of a group of ideas, a program is a collection of ideas, a product is the fruit of a group of ideas and methods derived from ideas.
Ideas are the Genesis of all the elements of our human made society. How do you allow people to get paid for creating an idea? If I generate millions of wonderful ideas and never get credit, what incentive is there for me to continue doing so.
All our IP laws are about trying to find a way to give a person credit for an idea. You can own an idea in the sense that you birthed it. Once the idea is in another person's mind, do they own it as much as you did? They can be said to own the idea but they did not birth it. They "stood on your shoulders" to get the idea.
Do you deserve credit? yes. Can you get compensation for it? maybe. Is it fair that the person who "birthed" VisiCalc doesn't get any royalties for "Excel" even though the Genesis for the idea of an Electronic Spreadsheet was birthed in his mind? No.
So life's not fair and ideas do get "stolen" but that's the nature of an idea.
Re:I have some ideas
by
Zeinfeld
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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.
--
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
It ain't just the blogs
by
wytcld
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Read the NY Times and then check the network newscasts that night - the networks will more often than not pick up on whatever the Times puts on the frong page, even when there's no necessary tie of the story to the particular day it's told. Then check the concensus of the talking heads on all those TV panels, and watch them move like square dancers between shows teaching each other the newly fashionable steps. It's enough to make you scream like Dean.
Or look at academic journals, and notice that most of the articles just recycle accepted variants on ideas. The exception is professors from just a few top schools - Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Berkeley, MIT - who have enough faith in their individual minds to actually follow ideas into new terrain. This is similar to why the NY Times reporters sometimes lead, too: their institution lends them the status to assume their instincts are good, while most of us are too insecure to be other than sheep.
-- "with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit
by
Frennzy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Mod parent up. Well spoken.
I, for one, use my blog not only for something to do that keeps me from playing video games, but it's a simple and easy method to keep my family and friends up to date on the inane and silly things going on in my household.
The primary reason I write on my blog is to do just that...write. It helps me to polish what little skill I may have, and keep the 'writing juices' flowing. I, like many unpublished writers (well, I had some poetry published in college, but that and $1.50 will get you a coffee at Starbuck's), still keep hope alive in the back of my mind that someday I will actually get a story or a novel published. I write my blog as a way of keeping my typing skills up, without worrying about excessive editing or typos. Occasionally, I'll actually have something of (what I consider) import to say, and I'll say it on my blog.
But guess what? Usually those are things that are fairly common to the human condition. As an example, what happens if I happen to be watching CNN and see a completely obvious falsehood presented as fact. I can go to their story on line, read it, and judge whether it was a mistake or not. If the error exists online, I can link to it in my blog, and post my correction. But, and this is the important part, I am VERY likely not the only person to do so. I am also VERY likely not to be the only person with a particular viewpoint, especially in the blogging community. People with viewpoints like to express them. It's not even remotely odd that many people, sharing the same viewpoint, would link to the same items on their blogs.
Memes unscientific
by
falsification
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Plagiarism is not a scientific term. Plagiarism is a literary term. You can't prove plagiarism scientifically. You can only prove it in the sense that other people agree with you.
The HP study is a purportedly scientific study of memes. That is where they erred.
Memes are unscientific. They have no validity in social science.
Don't cite some asshat scientific journal that talks about memes to me. The key to science is whether it can be falsified. (Note the username.)
As Karl Popper would say, there is nothing about the notion of a meme that can be falsified. Hence, it is not a scientific notion.
It's easy to see why computer scientists can be taken in by them. You see the world as if it were a computer. In fact, it is more complicated.
Go ahead, though, and play around. Waste your time with memes.
Slashdot Mirror
...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.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
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.
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.
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...
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.
t's what Open Source is all about: "sharing" other people's ideas and making sure they remain "shared".
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.
--- Ban humanity.
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
I wonder how much different blogs are in this respect than "traditional" journalism. Newspapers have to make efforts at times to ensure that they don't have the exact same headline. Also, it probably isn't too terribly suprising that in a world of mass-media, the collective consciousness is a bit hard to redirect. Mass-originality and memes are opposite concepts.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Now if someone reads about an idea, digests it, and is able to communicate the idea BETTER, is that plagiarism?
What is it with you slashdotters? You seem to have a grade school understanding of ideas and plagiarism. Have you ever seen DIFFERENT WORDINGS of the same idea? Have you ever seen DIFFERENT IDEAS worded similarly? Have you ever taken an undergraduate philosophy class? Until you can tell those situations apart and come up with a nuanced opinion, please learn not to label such things as plagiarism. It's akin to calling a flirt a rapist, or a lab mouse a rat.
I'm merely standing on the shoulders of a bunch of other midgets. We can see nearly as high as those who stand on the shoulders of giants... it just takes more of us and a little bit more walking.
[signature]
And the few times I actually RTFA I usually find that the Slashdot summary--with no quote marks--is copied verbatim from an opening paragraph of the article.
</gripe>
Bloggers are just information aggregators. They cull from their sources and post the interesting stuff. Slashdot's been doing it for years. There's too much on the web, and Bloggers act as (real, not top 40) DJs by selecting the best of what's out there and giving it a better. No one seems to complain that DJs don't end every song with "I heard that album from my friend Ted."
The service they provide is going through hundreds of bad links to find the interesting ones to recommend to their readers. I think this report is simply stating the obvious.
Also, if this is a big deal, why doesn't Slashdot include a "via" field for submissions to give credit to where the poster found the link? Personally, I always give credit for links when the site I found the link from supports TrackBack, any other times it's a crapshoot.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
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.
This just goes to show how fucked up we've become.
If I, blogger, quote someone else, even unattributed, or talk about someone else's idea, that's "theft?" Gimme a break. You don't automatically own ideas just because you write them down.
You can't really "own" an idea anyway -- there's no US constitutional provision for that, just an allowance for a limited monopoly to encourage more creation.
Blogs are, by definition, a conversation. Calling that conversation "theft" is ridiculous to an extremem. What, if I'm talking to someone IRL, should I force them to "license" my ideas before continuing?
"Sorry, before we can continue, please sign here and pay this fee. Then we can keep talking about my ideas about how to set up a new centralized login server."
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Read the NY Times and then check the network newscasts that night - the networks will more often than not pick up on whatever the Times puts on the frong page, even when there's no necessary tie of the story to the particular day it's told. Then check the concensus of the talking heads on all those TV panels, and watch them move like square dancers between shows teaching each other the newly fashionable steps. It's enough to make you scream like Dean.
Or look at academic journals, and notice that most of the articles just recycle accepted variants on ideas. The exception is professors from just a few top schools - Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton, Berkeley, MIT - who have enough faith in their individual minds to actually follow ideas into new terrain. This is similar to why the NY Times reporters sometimes lead, too: their institution lends them the status to assume their instincts are good, while most of us are too insecure to be other than sheep.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Mod parent up. Well spoken.
I, for one, use my blog not only for something to do that keeps me from playing video games, but it's a simple and easy method to keep my family and friends up to date on the inane and silly things going on in my household.
The primary reason I write on my blog is to do just that...write. It helps me to polish what little skill I may have, and keep the 'writing juices' flowing. I, like many unpublished writers (well, I had some poetry published in college, but that and $1.50 will get you a coffee at Starbuck's), still keep hope alive in the back of my mind that someday I will actually get a story or a novel published. I write my blog as a way of keeping my typing skills up, without worrying about excessive editing or typos. Occasionally, I'll actually have something of (what I consider) import to say, and I'll say it on my blog.
But guess what? Usually those are things that are fairly common to the human condition. As an example, what happens if I happen to be watching CNN and see a completely obvious falsehood presented as fact. I can go to their story on line, read it, and judge whether it was a mistake or not. If the error exists online, I can link to it in my blog, and post my correction. But, and this is the important part, I am VERY likely not the only person to do so. I am also VERY likely not to be the only person with a particular viewpoint, especially in the blogging community. People with viewpoints like to express them. It's not even remotely odd that many people, sharing the same viewpoint, would link to the same items on their blogs.
The HP study is a purportedly scientific study of memes. That is where they erred.
Memes are unscientific. They have no validity in social science.
Don't cite some asshat scientific journal that talks about memes to me. The key to science is whether it can be falsified. (Note the username.)
As Karl Popper would say, there is nothing about the notion of a meme that can be falsified. Hence, it is not a scientific notion.
It's easy to see why computer scientists can be taken in by them. You see the world as if it were a computer. In fact, it is more complicated.
Go ahead, though, and play around. Waste your time with memes.
A plague on all the meme foolishness.