Cyberspace Article #6 - Plagiarism Strikes Blog World

Date - 8th May 2006

Publication - Maura Welch, The Boston Globe

Summary
This article explains a disheartening concern in the Blogosphere of the Internet. Copying other people's work has become as instant as a click; and since there are over 38 million blogs on the Internet, plagiarism has become a nasty way to wreck someone's enjoyable time writing a blog. As described through Jonathan and Beth's experience of stolen identities, plagiarism threatens people who attract many readers to their blogs, while maintaining a subtle status in the Blogosphere. These people that plagiarise are just like six-year-olds in a school play ground trying to exaggerate stories to impress their friends, says Michael Zimmer, a doctoral candidate of the New York University. This article suggests to put a clear copyright to protect blog posts from further plagiarism. "Copyscape" is also mentioned as a good freeware program that can identify word for word copying off the Internet. Additionally, because the Blogosphere is fast and speedy at finding copies, plagiarism can be put to a halt once the website address is discovered.

Impact
Well this impacts just about everyone that write on the Internet. I wanted to do my oral presentation on plagiarism, rather than fraud. Maybe I got mixed up with those meanings. Anyway, sometimes we need to think about the downsides to the Internet. The Internet is convenient to all of us because of it's instant speed in communication, but also the instant speed to plagiarism, flaming, hacking, bullying and false information. Is there any way at all that we can avoid these things and without being in fear of someone mistreating the information of ourselves that we post on the Internet? No - where there's a will, there's a way. Maybe we have to accept the situation. Otherwise we have to either - over secure our computer and passwords to the point of making our computer too slow or forgetting a password to access a website OR not blog on the Internet at all.