Tech journalism is broken. Someone fix it. Please.
Maybe we can start by not referring to a lot of tech blogs as journalism. Some are, but most aren't - including many that would like us to think they are.
Plagiarism
111–120 of 326 posts
Re: Plagiarism
#112Zee/TheNextWeb has a history of copying others' work without permission, including for one period HN comments. See:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=640492
Note that what I was concerned about was not respectful excerpting: for a time, they were scraping every HN comment related to their links back to their site, without permission/notification to authors, without threading, with NOFOLLOW.
Re: Plagiarism
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do employees (and apparently CEOs) of online tech publications always seem to have so much trouble with basic English grammar/spelling? "I honestly absolutely no idea what we should have done differently" "We work immensely had to product original content"
I have a theory on this point, after witnessing this effect in a few other places (emails from prominent writers, CEOs, etc). Writers write so much that their fear of shipping their writing is diminished through practice, so they write, ship, write, ship, write, ship. They're in creative mode, just putting words on the paper. They're busy, so they go quickly, so that they can get more done. They know that when it mat…
You sound like a moron!
Re: Plagiarism
#114Update: image credit added after I posted this. Still, the image should be removed, this is copyright infringement. TheNextWeb is infamous for plagiarizing images for that section. Take this article, for example: http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/05/23/stylish-techno... The image at the top of the article is taken from this Dustin Curtis blog post: http://www.dustincurtis.com/press_on.html (the filename of the…
And another[1]:
You should credit @dexterous for screenshot used @ http://thenextweb.com/in/2012/05/03/indian-isps-reportedly-blocking-access-to-vimeo-and-some-torrent-sites/ Citation: http://twitpic.com/9gr7y9 https://twitter.com/#!/dexterous/status/198036547830947841
Re: Plagiarism
#115Update: see this comment on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875 Zee from TNW here. Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here. I honestly have absolutely no idea what we should have done differently here to illustrate an interesting fact with our readers and reference the original source (we did that twice in the article...even with his full name (a screenshot of which…
> Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here. Since you asked: Ask the original author if it would be ok to include his contribution in your derived work. > I honestly [] absolutely no idea what we should have done differently here to illustrate an interesting fact with our readers and reference the original source (we did that twice in the article...even with his full name (a scre…
> The Next Web is featured on HN quite frequently
I never understood the appeal of the TNW. Of the articles that did make it to the HN front page that I've seen, I've always thought the quality of the TNW's content was quite low. So I guess what's transpired today is not much of a surprise to me.
Re: Plagiarism
#116Update: see this comment on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875 Zee from TNW here. Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here. I honestly have absolutely no idea what we should have done differently here to illustrate an interesting fact with our readers and reference the original source (we did that twice in the article...even with his full name (a screenshot of which…
> We work immensely had to product original content as well as link to original sources when deserved...this case was absolutely no different. Zee, let me tell you something. When you lie, do not lie in a way that can be disproven by math. I mean, it was easy, so easy for me to take five minutes to plug in the article text to a difference calculator and find the result. And here's the outcome: There is a 58.632778264…
And, to boot is still in damage control mode, now that pretending ignorance does not work we're going for the 'unfortunate timing angle'.
Nice work on the distance calculation, I think you've just figured out a way to create a blogspam detector, if an article is linked from a newer article and there is a > X% (with X somewhere in the neighbourhood of 45%) or so similarity then it is blogspam.
Re: Plagiarism
#117All these shitheel sites do the same thing. BusinessInsider often doesn't even do the work of lightly rewriting paragraphs, they just rip content off wholesale. It's a dirty game, but I dunno if much can be done to stop it. The CEO's reaction is a disaster unto itself. Shameful.
There's a new breed of CEOs who use 'ur' in public correspondence. If that isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.
> There's a new breed of CEOs who use 'ur' in public correspondence.
Either that, or a very, very old breed.
Re: Plagiarism
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're called typos. Everybody makes them — even professional writers. In writing that's intended to make money, they're usually caught in editing. If you yourself write without ever producing a typo, that's nice, but it's not really all that important to the craft of writing — much less to owning a business that employs writers. At any rate, I don't see any reason to expect perfect prose in an informal context like…
AKA: Laziness. (Edited to fix spelling pointed out by child comment. Thanks.) I don't require perfection, just competence. If you don't care enough about your output to make it easily understandable (I don't have to put effort into deciphering your words), why should I care about it?
Ironically, if you'd spell-checked your comment, you would have seen the word you were looking for was "laziness". On the other hand, there's no easy mechanical way of noticing that a small word ("have") was omitted, which is one of the typos for which Zee was being criticized. So what you did is actually lazier than what he did. But I don't look down on you for this typo either. Both your comment and Zee's are pretty easy to understand.
Nobody's perfect. I make mistakes like this all the time, and I'm a professional editor. It's not incompetence — I simply don't have the time to carefully reread, spellcheck and grammar-check everything I write to make sure it's all flawless. And I know many intelligent people who make more mistakes than I do. So when I see somebody get called on a typo, but it's perfectly clear what they were saying in spite of the typo, I find it a bit petty.
Re: Plagiarism
#119Where are all the people defending "piracy" on this post? How much effort were a few paragraphs that got copied vs how much effort does it take to produce a movie, or a professionally recorded song?
The equivalent would be cutting the credits off a movie and replacing them with release group name and scene shoutouts.
Re: Plagiarism
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We work immensely had to product original content as well as link to original sources when deserved...this case was absolutely no different. Zee, let me tell you something. When you lie, do not lie in a way that can be disproven by math. I mean, it was easy, so easy for me to take five minutes to plug in the article text to a difference calculator and find the result. And here's the outcome: There is a 58.632778264…
And, to boot is still in damage control mode, now that pretending ignorance does not work we're going for the 'unfortunate timing angle'. Nice work on the distance calculation, I think you've just figured out a way to create a blogspam detector, if an article is linked from a newer article and there is a > X% (with X somewhere in the neighbourhood of 45%) or so similarity then it is blogspam.
Thanks, but the distance calculation is the work of Alex Martelli from Stack Overflow. It's one of the sources I cited: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3106994/algorithm-to-calc... I cited. It's simple enough that I probably could have thought of it on my own if I spent more time on it, but then again it was simple enough to find with a Google search.