03/05/2004: 
That's Entertainment?
Bloggers' Plagiarism Scientifically Proven
stolen from Slashdot, who got it from Wired, who got it from... 
Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution.
To satisfy their curiosity, the researchers began analyzing data from Intelliseek's BlogPulse Web crawler, which regularly mines thousands of blogs for references to people, places and events.
When they plotted the links and topics shared by various sites, they discovered that topics would often appear on a few relatively unknown blogs days before they appeared on more popular sites.
"What we're finding is that the important people on the Web are not necessarily the people with the most explicit links (back to their sites), but the people who cause epidemics in blog networks," said researcher Eytan Adar.
These infectious people can be hard to find because they do not always receive attribution for being the first to point to an interesting idea or news item.
Viva la Athenaeum!
