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This seems to be a summary with fluff and bad jokes. Here is the actual article: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6919139 http://www

This seems to be a summary with fluff and bad jokes. Here is the actual article: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6919139 http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=... Edit: apologies if I mispreresented mentalfloss.com. They did not add jokes -- they merely rephrased the same joke that kicks off the Economist article.

pg 19y ago
I agree with you. This seems to be a complete ripoff of the Economist article. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=184934 http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=184934 I bet we'll see more of this sort of "paraplagiarism" on the web. You could get a lot of traffic by finding old Economist articles about comparatively evergreen topics and paraphrasing them in a more sensationalist way. The average reddit/digg upvoter would never know. Does Mentalfloss often do this?
- wmf 19y ago
  Most of the articles on mainstream tech news sites like CNet and the Register are already rephrased press releases or summaries of articles written by actual journalists. Why should we expect bloggers to behave any better? For example, check out this article that doesn't even bother to hide the fact that it was completely copied from EE Times: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/04/28/will-the-feds-stand-in-the-way-of-pa-semi.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2008/04/28/will-the-fe... Why not just link to the original? Oh yeah, pageviews. cf. http://publishing2.com/2008/05/04/the-declining-value-of-redundant-news-content-on-the-web/ http://publishing2.com/2008/05/04/the-declining-value-of-red...
- deleted 19y ago
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robg 19y ago
I'm in total agreement with you and pg. If they had linked to the original, I would have instead. Thanks for tracking it down.