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."
Isn't that google search for Miserable Failure enough of an example?
Generally stealing ideas is good for growth
by
kompiluj
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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...
-- You can defy gravity... for a short time
Depends really
by
Ratface
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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!)
--
A little planning goes a long way...
Self-Pleasure Circuit
by
Melvin+Daniels
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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
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NSash
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit
by
Apathetic1
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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!
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.
--
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
Blog tracking services
by
G4from128k
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
-- Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
and the gratuitous repost
by
The+Tyro
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· Score: 2, Interesting
syndrome... where somebody takes somebody else's commment, copies it enbloc, and reposts it in a higher subthread.
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.
-- Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Re:Few Original Ideas
by
AndrewWood
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· 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 ...
by
jobbegea
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· Score: 2, Interesting
they all use this Blog Drone. That's why it all looks the same.
--
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
If Shakespeare were a blogger
by
truthsearch
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· Score: 2, Interesting
But if Shakespeare were a blogger he'd put everyone else to shame. Few of his time were able to express things with as much passion. Almost no bloggers stand out to such an extent.
Did I just write "But if Shakespeare were a blogger..."? Wow, that's a 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..
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
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"Of course, this begs the question" No, it doesn't. Do you even know what that means?
I am shocked, shocked.
by
deacon
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Lets see:
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.
that the Wired story did not reference Richard Dawkins, who coined the term "meme" in the Selfish Gene, and drew an analogy between the transmission of information with the transmission of viruses.
Then again, I don't know if Richard Dawkins got the idea from William S. Burroughs or vice versa.
Don't most non-personal bloggers just circulate links and provide commentary on current events? Like, you know, newspapers? You don't see anyone accusing the Washington Post of plagiarizing from the New York Times when they both publish op-ed pieces on the same topic.
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
-- Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
Re:Bloggers
by
AndroidCat
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Aggregators also filter and concentrate. If they get their good ideas from somewhere else, but filter out the bad ideas, then that's a valuable service. (Good, bad.. are just labels for ideas that spread or don't in the blog zeitgeist.)
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Huge Potential in Memetic Tracking
by
TwistedGreen
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Wow! This idea is incredibly exciting ! 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...
by
bbrazil
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· Score: 3, Interesting
'The Tipping Point' by Malcom Gladwell.
Looks at the spread of ideas/diseaeses. Quite interesting but the conclusion is a bit strong.
funny and insightful!
by
simpl3x
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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!
by
Lawbeefaroni
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
-- "When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
Re:CNN? FoxNews? NYTimes?
by
OECD
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· Score: 2, 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.
-- One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
email tracking
by
donbrock
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As a somewhat related topic, I would to see a study on how fast and widespread shared emails spread around the internet such as jokes or cartoons. This could be quite useful in tracking emails with a political message.
It seems that tracking emails shouldn't be too difficult to do because so many people leave the topics and email chain intact in their forwarded emails.
I quote liberally from other sources in my blog. I don't have time to paraphrase and reword every single article I happen to find interesting. I don't consider it plagiarism because:
I credit my source, and often provide a link to it in my posts.
I include the full text of the article in case it goes away, gets slashdotted, gets edited, gets censored, etc.
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!
-- You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Re:It's what Open Source is all about
by
FroMan
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Depends on the license.
That is what the GPL is about.
BSD is about sharing and not looking for anything in return.
-- Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
Re:Few Original Ideas
by
Suidae
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder if the particular ratio of original thinkers to the rest of the population has been optimized by evolution. New ideas are good, but only if there are enough people to test them and filter out the stuff that doesn't work. If everybody was busy coming up with new ideas instead of using what they already had, the entire world would look like... well, like programming.
Good point. In fact, if we look at our own surfing habits, what Web tools we use, where we shop, what we bookmark, it is usually sites that have a high quality in their aggregation of resources, whether it be tools, products,...
They provide guidance or tutorial with high clarity and quality (high precision) for all the items/products/links in their site.
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
by
peter303
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Memes are ideas that flow through and define a culture. Blogs are just mechanism of doing this. In the past other media- gossip, schools, and newspapers- facilitated the flow of memes. Only a small fraction of memes are original, but are endless propagated. Wired tries to capture a few of this in its monthly section on new memes.
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.
The graphs produced by HP resemble this self-referential meme: a meme tree that maps its own propagation.
Re:It's what Open Source is all about
by
turnstyle
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· Score: 4, Interesting
"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 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
by
Salamander
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· Score: 4, 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.
-- Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Re:"Plagiarism"
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Asprin
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· Score: 1, 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.
-- "Lawyers are for sucks." - Doug McKenzie
Re:Few Original Ideas
by
Dystopian+Rebel
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, good thinking... it's a kind of social Quality Assurance team, doing the clicking and bounds-testing and pushing the "product" around.
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.;^)
-- Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Re:Bad writers plagiarize?
by
iamacat
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Wow. Attribution rules are for academic research and published books. Software licenses can well allow "plagarism" - GPL for example doesn't require attribution. As for one-paragraph slashdot comments - well they should be up for grabs unless we want to see 10 pages of references after each of them. Folk culture can't very well spread with academic research restrictions.
Edgar Allan Poe...
by
decep
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· Score: 2, Interesting
discusses this in "Criticism". Although this concept was not the point of his article, it is still applicable.
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/works/criticis/toc .h tml (first few lines)
Not for individuality...
by
Azureflare
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Blogs aren't necessarily for the individuality! I feel they primarily exist for a sense of community. You are reading that blog to join other like-minded people who you can converse with and talk about things that interest you. You don't browse blogs just so you can read some weirdo ranting on about some bizarro ideas they have. (unless you feel the same way...;)
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
by
Nynaeve
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From the article:
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
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
The reason that so many bloggers frequently hop onboard the bandwagon of ideas, is that so many of them frequently think similarly, and evaluate as favorable, similar ideas. There is nothing "wrong" with this in any way such that we would say it is "wrong" in other situations.
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
by
AshtangiMan
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps a troll . . . but so wrong.
If you allow language to evolve through ignorance of actual meaning, you allow it to devolve. That is, you slowly lose the ability to express certain ideas easily. We see this in the US quite often, and I believe it to be principle in our accelerating downward spiral. De-evlolution is not a good thing, as it reduces richness and complexity.
Slight confusion detected. Ideas are inherently valuable--the good ones at least. But the amount that a good idea can be sold for (due to copyright/patent protection) is miniscule compared to the value that comes from applying the idea (reading a published work or using an invention based on the idea). So ideally, the protection of an idea's sale value should be enough to keep the good ideas coming, without adversely affecting the application value.
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.
--
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that google search for Miserable Failure enough of an example?
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...
You can defy gravity... for a short time
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!)
A little planning goes a long way...
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'.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
syndrome... where somebody takes somebody else's commment, copies it enbloc, and reposts it in a higher subthread.
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.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
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 all use this Blog Drone. That's why it all looks the same.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
But if Shakespeare were a blogger he'd put everyone else to shame. Few of his time were able to express things with as much passion. Almost no bloggers stand out to such an extent.
Did I just write "But if Shakespeare were a blogger..."? Wow, that's a first...
Developers: We can use your help.
It's implementing them that is difficult...
Which is why patents should only be granted the demonstration of a working example...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I think it's the fact that the more popular bloggers put their ideas across in a clearer way than the less know bloggers..
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.
"Of course, this begs the question"
No, it doesn't. Do you even know what that means?
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.
that the Wired story did not reference Richard Dawkins, who coined the term "meme" in the Selfish Gene, and drew an analogy between the transmission of information with the transmission of viruses. Then again, I don't know if Richard Dawkins got the idea from William S. Burroughs or vice versa.
Don't most non-personal bloggers just circulate links and provide commentary on current events? Like, you know, newspapers? You don't see anyone accusing the Washington Post of plagiarizing from the New York Times when they both publish op-ed pieces on the same topic.
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
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
Aggregators also filter and concentrate. If they get their good ideas from somewhere else, but filter out the bad ideas, then that's a valuable service. (Good, bad .. are just labels for ideas that spread or don't in the blog zeitgeist.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Wow! This idea is incredibly exciting
! 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.
'The Tipping Point' by Malcom Gladwell. Looks at the spread of ideas/diseaeses. Quite interesting but the conclusion is a bit strong.
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...
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.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
As a somewhat related topic, I would to see a study on how fast and widespread shared emails spread around the internet such as jokes or cartoons. This could be quite useful in tracking emails with a political message. It seems that tracking emails shouldn't be too difficult to do because so many people leave the topics and email chain intact in their forwarded emails.
The Truth About Slashdot
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!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Depends on the license.
That is what the GPL is about.
BSD is about sharing and not looking for anything in return.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
I wonder if the particular ratio of original thinkers to the rest of the population has been optimized by evolution. New ideas are good, but only if there are enough people to test them and filter out the stuff that doesn't work. If everybody was busy coming up with new ideas instead of using what they already had, the entire world would look like... well, like programming.
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 are ideas that flow through and define a culture. Blogs are just mechanism of doing this. In the past other media- gossip, schools, and newspapers- facilitated the flow of memes. Only a small fraction of memes are original, but are endless propagated. Wired tries to capture a few of this in its monthly section on new memes.
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.
The graphs produced by HP resemble this self-referential meme: a meme tree that maps its own propagation.
From my own experience, I've been working on my MP3 juke/server software Andromeda 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.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
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.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
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.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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. ;^)
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Wow. Attribution rules are for academic research and published books. Software licenses can well allow "plagarism" - GPL for example doesn't require attribution. As for one-paragraph slashdot comments - well they should be up for grabs unless we want to see 10 pages of references after each of them. Folk culture can't very well spread with academic research restrictions.
discusses this in "Criticism". Although this concept was not the point of his article, it is still applicable.
c .h tml
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/works/criticis/to
(first few lines)
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.
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!
The reason that so many bloggers frequently hop onboard the bandwagon of ideas, is that so many of them frequently think similarly, and evaluate as favorable, similar ideas. There is nothing "wrong" with this in any way such that we would say it is "wrong" in other situations.
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!
Perhaps a troll . . . but so wrong. If you allow language to evolve through ignorance of actual meaning, you allow it to devolve. That is, you slowly lose the ability to express certain ideas easily. We see this in the US quite often, and I believe it to be principle in our accelerating downward spiral. De-evlolution is not a good thing, as it reduces richness and complexity.
Slight confusion detected. Ideas are inherently valuable--the good ones at least. But the amount that a good idea can be sold for (due to copyright/patent protection) is miniscule compared to the value that comes from applying the idea (reading a published work or using an invention based on the idea). So ideally, the protection of an idea's sale value should be enough to keep the good ideas coming, without adversely affecting the application value.
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.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!