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
·
· 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
Self-Pleasure Circuit
by
Melvin+Daniels
·
· 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
by
NSash
·
· 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.
Blog tracking services
by
G4from128k
·
· 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.
Re:Few Original Ideas
by
AndrewWood
·
· 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.)
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 am shocked, shocked.
by
deacon
·
· 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.
Reminds me of a book...
by
bbrazil
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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:It's what Open Source is all about
by
turnstyle
·
· 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
·
· 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:Few Original Ideas
by
Dystopian+Rebel
·
· 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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
'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...
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.
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.