Wired magazine has an article about the infection rate of weblogs. They looked at the sources of information for popular blogs and found that in many cases, less popular blogs were the first sources, and often the more popular blogs did not cite their sources.
“The most-read webloggers aren’t necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.”
We need to get some librarians out there to teach people how to do proper citations. This story reminded me of a professor I spoke with recently who had his class re-do a one page issue paper assignment because half of them had blatantly plagiarized (i.e. cut and paste entire paragraphs from the web). Most of them had no idea that what they did was wrong.
