Comments on: attribution on blogs

By: Ben Hyde

Ben Hyde — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 05:51:14 +0000

Amen!

We get a lot of this maddness in the open source community. People decide that the thing is a problem what needs explaining. They decided they know the motive force is, they then get all excited about how that might lead to scarcity and rivalry at which point their market based models can page in. Problem resolved. It’s lame.

I found the HP research very irritating. Of course the leaves of the network dig up the fresh stuff while the hubs are focused on pumping that around. That’s the nature of leaves and hubs. It’s like discovering that eBay doesn’t any of that stuff their selling, or google didn’t write all those pages.

By: rPm

rPm — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 12:42:49 +0000

attribution can also serve multiple purposes. one might attribute an information source out of kindness, rather than necessity; or out of self-interest, in order to curry favor with the original author. attribution is an inherently social phenomenon, and people’s actions along these lines have to be regarded in the context of the community within which the attribution is made.

btw, i do find it interesting that you’re blogging to write about your frustrations with blogs. ouroboros, anyone? or maybe godel. not sure.

By: Holly's Research Journal

Holly's Research Journal — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 20:16:21 +0000

Meme spreading in the blogosphere

Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious .

By: plasticbag.org

plasticbag.org — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 00:36:41 +0000

Why do bloggers kill kittens?

A couple of days ago I posted a rather aggressive link through to 2lmc the other day complaining about their post Most read blogs least original which cited an article from Wired News called Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious (itself…

By: neilfred

neilfred — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 17:52:56 +0000

> The concept of public is far more complicated than we often realize.

Danny O’Brien has written some interesting thoughts on this issue here –
http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2003/10/13#1066058820

Also, on the subject of text borrowed without attribution, see the following by Lilly Tao –
http://www.girlhacker.com/2004_03_01_archive.html#10781941149740277

-neilfred

By: plasticbag.org

plasticbag.org — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 08:08:52 +0000

Why do bloggers kill kittens?

By: c h a n d r a s u t r a

c h a n d r a s u t r a — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 15:40:02 +0000

‘Corporate research’ or ‘how to sell us more crap we don’t need’

According to Amit Asaravala’s WIRED article “Warnding: blogs can be infectious”, Hewlitt Packard researchers have developed some techniques to graph

By: c h a n d r a s u t r a

c h a n d r a s u t r a — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 15:38:31 +0000

‘Corporate research’ or ‘how to sell us more crap we don’t need’

According to Amit Asaravala’s article in WIRED magazine, Hewlitt Packard researchers have developed some techniques to graph “the flow of

By: Mel

Mel — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 14:13:16 +0000

“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.”

They define two groups here: sociologists and marketers. One is academic the other commercial. I think it’s interesting that the article goes on to only discuss the purposes of the researchers without speaking to the marketing angle – something that is far more troubling to me than the creation or circulation of a meme. Corporate interests fund the majority of such studies. The real story here, in my opinion, is that marketers are funding a study that is ostensibly about (presented as) as study of the circulation of ideas. The actualy purpose is to generate tools that will help corporations.

As far as I’m concerned the whole meme search, idea origin, etc is just a red herring meant to throw us off the real scent – corporate interest.

By: Lawrence Krubner

Lawrence Krubner — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 08:21:39 +0000

I read the article yesterday and thought they were venturing out of the world of computers and delving into some still unresovled sociological/psychological issues about where ideas come from. If person A gives person B an idea, and then person B combines that with something else they were thinking, and comes up with a theory that then becomes famous, who invented the famous idea? Who should get credit?

To take a famous example, that is still controversial, does Richard Hooke deserve any credit for the discovery of gravity? It is know that Newton began looking seriously at the issue of gravity in 1682-1684. At that time, he felt that the sun had a repulsive force, but that something restrained the planets from flying out into space. Robert Hooke strongly believed that the Sun had an attractive force that was pulling the planets inward. After two years, Newton changed his mind and agreed with Hooke. This lead him down the right path toward what he would eventually name “gravity.” After several more years of hard work, in 1688, Newton published Principia Mathematica, announcing that all mass attracted other mass, proportional to its mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. The theory of gravity was born.

Who invented it? Without Hooke’s assertion that the Sun had an attractive force, Newton might never have looked in the right places to explain what he was seeing in the movement of the planets. Clearly, Hooke infected Newton. But Hooke didn’t realize the attractive force was created by mass, nor did he assert the existence of “actions at a distance.”

So my reaction reading the HP study was, “Are these appropriate places for attribution? How much did the final blogger change the meme they’d read elsewhere? How originial does the final idea have to be before the final poster is entitled to 100% credit? And can a computer algorithm determine the level of originality?”