Study Proves The Obvious: Bloggers Plagarize. But the Problem is a Lot Bigger Than That

Hewlett Packard labs has done a study proving that more than 70% of the time, top bloggers plagarize from lesser known bloggers. I could have told them that for a whole lot less than I'm sure they spent. But the real online plagarism problem goes way beyond bloggers.

Says Slashdot "from the we-prefer-to-say-'borrow' dept: the HP study scientifically proves what most people already knew: bloggers steal their ideas from other bloggers."

For example, sleazeball gossip monger blogger Matt Drudge claimed a "worldwide exclusive" on the alleged, and quickly disproved rumor of an affair between John Kerry and an intern. In fact, the story had been reported several days earlier on Watchblog. Nonetheless, international media, without exception, credited Drudge with the scoop.

In a Guardian column entitled "Why Drudge is Bad for the Internet," Paul Carr notes that "Drudge refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good lie, but that most of those lies Ö are supplied to him by print journalists who don't have enough evidence to put them into their own pages.

Thanks to people like Drudge, the Internet is turning into a gigantic gossip laundering operation for cowardly print hacks. Heard a juicy rumour about a presidential candidate? Know it's probably total rubbish but want to print it anyway? No problem! Just leak it to Drudge, wait for him to print it and then run it in your own pages as an "internet rumour". Job done."

Many bloggers, like Slashdot, Instapundit and MarketingWonk are aggregators, who do a limited amount of original reporting. These three and many others strive to high journalistic standards. They comment on relevant news with credit to a wide range of sources. A lot of blogs, including some of the bigger names, just lift content from other blogs without accreditation.

Publicists Don't Mind
This practice is not unique to bloggers. It is also the norm for wire services like Associated Press, which, according to a many reporters, frequently picks up stories from member papers without providing attribution.

Smart publicists know, for example, that certain newspaper writers syndicate appropriate copy to wire services. So coverage in a local paper can result in a national story when that writer's story is picked up by a service like AP. And Web savvy PR people know which small circulation bloggers' posts are most likely to be "borrowed" by bloggers with wider audiences.

And any publicist can attest that even at the biggest media outlets, press releases, without a word changed, are often run under reporters' bylines. Publicists don't complain about this practice; their clients are happy for the placements.

Time to Stop Stealing
That's fine as long as the story is positive. But when it's an unsubstantiated negative story, it's hard to fight back. News, good and bad, stays online, available through search engines, forever. The only way to counter bad news is with a greater quantity of good news. It's hard to get attention for a correction. News gets old in days, and nobody wants to hear old news, even if it is correcting wrong information.

Says the HP study, "These findings are important to sociologists who are interested in learning how ideas grow from isolated topics into full-blown epidemics that "infect" large populations. 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."

HP has come up with an algorythm that is supposed to ferret out the originator of information so people can go to the source, rather than the aggregator. The team has made some of its research available online in the form of the Blog Epidemic Analyzer, a Java program that reveals the implicit and inferred links between blogs in an interactive, visual form.

They hope to be able to apply the technology to other information, like e-mail, to improve productivity.

More importantly, I hope bloggers and other journalists will stop stealing from eachother and start giving their sources attribution.

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Posted by: Soma at August 14, 2004 4:48 PM

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