Anderson. Chris. Plagiarism? You decide (ho hum)
Has best-selling author plagiarised other works for his new book?
Note: The image (above) is not my work. I copied and pasted if from the Virginia Quarterly Review without their permission. Bad? Maybe. But at least there’s no risk of you thinking it’s my own work.
Has Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of ‘The Long Tail’ plagiarised Wikipedia (and other sources) in the writing of his new book? What if he has? Who the hell cares anyway? In this era of cut-and-paste mashup where everybody lifts everything and nobody owns nothing…
These people seem to care.
And actually, I do too. A lot.
For some people the issue of plagiarism is some old-fashioned educational nonsense from the good old, bad old days of dull, authoritarian education. You know, those musty pre-internet days when children were made to read, write and spell properly if they were to stand any chance of growing up to be well-adjusted adults capable of going to war with each other and despoiling the planet.
By the time I quit lecturing in 2004 at a well-respected University in the West of England, students were not only committing plagiarism for their ‘written’ work (’pasted’ would be a more accurate term) but they were doing it for their practical graphic design work too. Yes. Their practical work. I remember one revealing after receiving a high 2.1 degree that he had simply borrowed his final year practical work. His contempt for the system that couldn’t - or wouldn’t - detect his plagiarism was equalled only by the contempt he had for his own lack of motivation and effort.
Judging by his comments in today’s thread and on his own blog, Anderson seems determined to play down the accusations of plagiarism and in so doing, I personally think he further damages his credibility. Why? Because this isn’t a failure to properly cite sources. It isn’t an accidentally-dropped pair of quotation marks either. It is a conscious act of copying, pasting and editing text into a document and formatting it so that it ends up reading as his own words.
I for one am glad the issue is out in the open and thank Chris Anderson for - unintentionally - raising it. But is this really an issue of intellectual property and copyright in the digital age? Could it instead be about plagiarism as a symptom of the decline of critical thinking in our culture?
WP 2.8: Upgrade madness
90% of existing plugins won’t work after you upgrade to WP 2.8
This means that if you follow the instructions to ‘please update now’ you’re going to suddenly find your site not working. Excellent. Superb. Wonderful. That’s what I call progress. Add to that the fact that WP 2.8 doesn’t actually upgrade or work 100% properly, according to this review.
I don’t know about you, but I’m up to here with this ridiculous upgrade culture I find myself in. Every time I manage to get my site just about working again after the previous cosmetic Wordpress upgrade, they - someone! - go and release another version. This usually breaks my site again. Either the installation doesn’t work or the plugins don’t.
Do any of you ever ask why we do this? Who decides? Does it have to be this way?
I don’t want 2.8. I didn’t actually want WP 2.7.1 - certainly not the hassle of upgrading it (which isn’t very simple or clear). Strangely enough, I didn’t want 2.6.1 either because 2.5 worked just fine but in Digital Britain you don’t get a choice.
500 years since Henry VIII came to the throne
And this is how far we’ve evolved?
Viagra spam. We’ve all had it. (Haven’t we?!?!). It comes in all shapes and sizes: there’s the text-only, ‘appeal to your sense of masculinity’ kind. There’s the ‘picture of the yummy pills’ kind. And now this. An appealing ‘before and after’ dong picture.
So here we are, 500 years after the coronation of Henry VIII. In that time, we’ve mastered trans-oceanic navigation, created the industrial revolution, risen into the air, sent men to the moon and invented the digital computer. All for what?
So that our economies can fall apart because we’re all too greedy to stop consuming and too technologically rapt to stop ruining the environment? And because - if the explosion of spam of all kinds is any kind of mirror - too guided by our dicks to evolve beyond the blood-thirstiness of the 16th century.
Ah well.
‘The weakest link in any organisation is its people’. Charming
Does the organisation you work in treat people as its weakest link?
These words were spoken by Richard Thomas, Information Commissioner this morning on the Today Show on Radio 4. He was talking about the risk of misuse of information in relation to mobile phone details. But his words sounds strikingly inhuman.
What he meant was, in fact, this: ‘We’ve created an environment in which your mobile phone personal data will very likely be exploited, misused or otherwise abused. If it is, it will, however, be because people in organisations are inherently bad and untrustworthy, not because we made it possible in the first place’.
His words are typical of corporate irresponsibility. They’re also typical of a way of thinking that structures our organisations (business and social) to ‘contain’ the worst employee, rather than ‘liberate’ the best.
Stand back and take a look at the organisation you work in; maybe the one you set up. Is it built to contain the worst possible employee, or liberate the best?
How do I close my Ecademy account? Day 4
I’m no closer to closing my Ecademy account despite emailing support
The Ecademy wars seem to be rolling on. How do I know this? Because despite categorically switching OFF notifications I’m still getting an email every time someone else posts in the latest argument thread. So that option doesn’t work.
And it’s day 4 in my quest to quit Ecademy. At the weekend, I used the Ecademy ’support’ option to request detailed information how I could close my account, since there are no options anywhere on the site allowing me to do this.
Guess what? No response. No ‘Your Support Request has been acknowledged’. Nothing.
I really don’t want to go back in there and have to commit Ecademy suicide. It could be messy. Hey! Maybe that’s what all those childish, small-minded egos in there are actually trying to do! Now I understand. 
Make your blog work with the iPhone
WPTouch plugin makes your blog readable by iPhone
If you’re a blogger, you might like WPTouch, the plugin for Wordpress that once activated, outputs a version of your blog in a format designed for iPhone users.
It’s brilliant! But how come I didn’t know about it before?
Well, I can think of st least two reasons, depressingly common in online media. First of all, there’s the dire and counter-intuitive interface of the Wordpress ‘Extend’ plugin repository. Try finding something there to solve a problem you might have. No chance unless you already know the name of the thing you need to solve the problem…in which case, you wouldn’t be bloody well looking for it, would you?
Then there’s a peculiar tendency of developers to give their plugins names that give no hint of what they might do in case they might help you solve your problem without sufficient frustration and suffering. I mean, ‘WPTouch’? Why not ‘ConvertWPtoiPhone’ for God’s sake?
If a friend hadn’t told me about it, I doubt if I would have found it at all. Mad - particularly since it opens your blog up to the entire world of iPhone users, especially via Twitter.
Its worth remembering that this mobile internet stuff is really still in its infancy. It’s taken me over 30 frustrating minutes to write this on my iPhone and I haven’t got the energy to try to work out how to copy and paste a link URL, but miracle of miracles, I’m doing it on train travelling at 125mph.
Mustn’t grumble, eh?
Skype Spam: top marks for politeness
Skype Spammer exhibits manners and sense of humour
I got interrupted with a Skype IM spammer earlier today. You know, one of those guys who happens to be holding the countless millions of dollars left to you by the brother you never knew you had?
I thought I’d send a quick response summarising my feelings. So I did - and got a chirpy reply back. How nice. Who said these scammers don’t have at least a sense of humour!
And that name rings a bell, too.
Close my Ecademy account: Day 2
Day 2 of my quest to close my Ecademy account
Ok, so it’s a Sunday - and I started out trying to close my Ecademy account on a Saturday. I wouldn’t really expect much response from the technical support people. That’s ok, I’m not bitching about that.
What IS annoying, however, is the lack of ‘OFF’ button anywhere on the site itself or instructions telling you how to do it.
Twitter, on the other hand, has a simple ‘delete account’ link on the bottom of your Settings page. No sign of such a thing on Ecademy.
Why am I recording the process of leaving a social media site like Ecademy? Because I want to find out just how easy or hard it is. Oh, and because I’m finding I have less time (or inclination) to ’shoot the shit’ online with a handful of other one-mand-band folks. And because I’ve had enough of being spammed by ‘BlackStars’ and invited to connect with complete strangers.
You don’t have to be a genuis to realise that for an online business networking site, users are important and active users are vital. I’m no longer an active user at Ecademy but I am a user on paper and as such, an important part of their package to sell new memberships and sponsorships. Why would they want their numbers to decrease?
The answer is, they don’t. Ecademy is populated by ‘people’ who (someone) signed up for a free membership but who have since not been active. Actually, quite a large number, if you can be bothered to plod through and check each one by hand.
Anyway. Day 2 of trying to close my account I expect nothing to happen. Just thought I’d fill you in on a bit of the context while we wait for the tech support people at Ecademy to come back to me with a friendly email detailing how to close my Ecademy account.
How to close my ecademy account: day 1
Join me on a Social Media Odyssey: the quest to close my Ecademy account
Sat June 6th 2009:
Although I’ve not been on Ecademy for a while and am only there with a free (grey star) account, a Tweet from a friend drew me back to read a blog. Actually, to witness a long-drawn out, destructive argument. I made the mistake of adding a comment to the effect of ‘This is why I don’t come here any more”. The result was an email notification of every subsequent comment on the thread. Doh.
So I went back in to turn off all email notifications. Fine, I thought. I’ll just leave it at that and simply not go there. I turned off all notifications in my account control panel but still the emails keep coming. Doh!
Ok, I thought, time to leave for good. So I went looking for a ‘close my account’ button. Guess what? I can’t find one. So I searched in the ‘Help’ section with “close my account” and “how to close my account” and “closing my account” and got no results. Curious.
Next step - go to Google. All I found were a few comments about how impossible it seems to be to leave. Interesting.
Since I’m only a free member of Ecademy, I can’t start blogs but I can respond to them, so I hi-jacked a thread with a request for information on how to leave. Trouble is, I’ll have to go back into Ecademy to find out if there are any replies. Doh.
Finally, I sent a ’support request’ - see screen shot (right). It’s very straightforward so I’ll be interested to see what happens next.
Twitter staff don’t get high on their own supply
Twitter staff not taking own medicine, reports ReadWriteWeb
I wonder why?
Could it be that they’ve got better things to do? Like doing stuff in real life? Or planning what to do with all that lovely money they’ll make when someone eventually buys Twitter?
A post in ReadWriteWeb asks why Twitter staff seem to be using Twitter in a very different way from everyone else.
Something tells me that this won’t be a popular view, but I think that social media are inherently addictive in nature and deliberately so. They’re designed to plug into the ego and to ‘fix’ how we feel about ourselves. Twitter is the new cigarette: once you started, you just can’t stop. Sure you can. Go on then.
‘Don’t get high on your own supply’ was the watchword of the smart drug dealer of the 1980s. Watch ‘Goodfellas’ and you’ll understand why.
The mark of a true dealer is he that gives enough away for free to build a customer base that can’t do without his stuff - yet stays in control by not using himself. The mark of a true addict is how ferociously he/she fights to defend his need to use what the dealer supplies.
What do you think?
Read the ReadWriteWeb post here.
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