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January 19, 2006
Aggregated plagiarism
My digiliteracy is going to have to ramp up enough to understand this. (Scroll down to "Wholesale Blog Plagiarism … Alert.") When I first heard of the idea that RSS aggregation could be considered plagiarism, I assumed that those who thought so were just ignorant of how RSS feeds work. (Lo, I am possessed of a default hubris that allows me to assume that what little I know about a topic is [a] accurate and [b] comprehensive. I have to be confronted with the fact that I'm wrong before it occurs to me that I might be. Verily.) But I'm learning that my innocuous Bloglines aggregator bears little resemblance to sites that feed from popular blogs in order to garner advertising income. I wonder whether something along these lines might be what Clancy has been experiencing. Metafilter offers a brief overview of the issues.
Posted by senioritis at January 19, 2006 07:52 PM
Comments
what your bloglines does is what bolter & grusin call "remediation" (i.e. "re"-contextualized bits of "media"); my inclination would be to say it works the same way as other textual borrowing: when it's fairly acknowledged/attributed it's not plagiarising, but when it's not, it is. "masks their identi[t]y" would be a key phrase for me in identifying this as inappropriate textual appropriation!
Posted by: tyra at January 19, 2006 11:35 PM
I use bloglines to follow new posts, that's all, like a more-efficient blogroll. But I've been aware that some of my posts are reposted elsewehere. I will have to check this out...
Posted by: liz at January 20, 2006 01:30 PM