The internet was on fire on Sunday after Maureen Dowd, New York Times op-ed columnist, admitted she had plagiarized the work of Talking Points Memo blogger, Josh Marshall. The Huffington Post published an e-mail where Dowd admitted her error:

josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.

we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Unless this was an IM discussion, it’s questionable how the 43-word paragraph made it nearly verbatim into Dowd’s column, but enough crucifying of Maureen Dowd has occurred across the blogosphere, so I’m going to pass on that aspect of the discussion. What I see here is not just a case of plagiarism, but a perfectly illustrative situation of the general disrespect of mainstream media for the blogosphere.

Much has been said about the importance of mainstream media: they have the fact-checkers, resources, and the investigative teams and they are the only ones who can do the kind of unearthing that enables us to live as an informed society. Bloggers, on the other hand, are the exploiters, the ones who take the hard work of journalists everywhere and turn it into cheap (or, in most cases, free) photocopies. Shame on those bloggers, shame, shame, shame.

Except that’s not really the case. Increasingly, the exploitation is happening on the side of the mainstream media.

In February, a friend of mine, Brooks Bayne, wrote a blog post about the suspiciously massive increase in followers for select Twitter users. Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter left him a comment explaining it was a possible effect of the Suggested Users feature that Twitter had recently implemented.

A couple of days later, The LA Times’ Mark Milian picked up the story and featured William’s comment. While Milian’s piece links the original blog post, no credit is given to Bayne. Milian simply credits the comment as having appeared on “another blog post.”

I contacted Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and a champion of the blogosphere’s role in journalism, about the issue. He responded via e-mail, saying: “It happens all the time. It sucks.”

Rosen told me there was no standard for citing the information or ideas that journalists fid in blogs or new media.

“There should be,” he said.

He linked me to Can I Get A Link Please?, a site devoted to getting bloggers linked back by the mainstream publications that use their content, information, and ideas.

The blog lists a study by Brodeur released last year which reveals that over three quarters of the journalists surveyed use blogs to get story ideas, insight and angles. A piece at Taking The Blogosphere Seriously summarized the results as follows:

Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week… About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.

The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.

Can I Get A Link Please? also features a clip from a panel at the Carnegie Counsel’s Ethics Studio featuring Rosen, in which he illustrates the importance of the link, not only in terms of attribution, but in terms of using the web as it was made to be used—to connect information.

The link—which is the idea that “you’re interested in this, but did you know about that?” Or “here is what I’m saying, but you should you see what they’re saying.” Or “you’re here but you know there is also this over there,”—is actually building out the potential of the web to link people, which is what Timothy Berners-Lee put into it in the first place. So when we link, we are expressing the ethic of the web, which is connecting people and knowledge.

… When we talk about this stereotypical conflict between the bloggers and the mainstream media—by the way, Michael, the only people who worry about whether bloggers are going to replace the news media are people who work in the news media. Nobody else talks about that.

But when we think about it, think about the news industry’s reaction to the rise of the web. When the major news sites built their first pages, which was about 1996, they decided to re-purpose their content from the print platform and put it it online, which certainly makes sense. You paid all the costs already for all the articles and features that you produced for The Washington Post newspaper, now you have this new way to distribute them, put them onoine, you get new audience, new readers… In re-purposing their content on the web, which is a rational thing, they made up some rules from themselves. One of the rules was: you don’t send people away from your domain. That is, you don’t link out from the Washington Post to the rest of the web. Because you’re the Washinton Post! You have everything… why would we send you anywhere else?

So when they decided to give birth to their first websites, their sites were actually anti-web because they didn’t understand the ethic of the link. And they didn’t accept the ethic of the link. And it’s taken them a long time to learn the ethic of the link because the Washington Post is willing to share their knowledge with you but the whole idea of connecting people to knowledge wherever it is, which is the ethic of the web, has taken them a while to understand. And so the bloggers were the people who came along and who developed the web first as a tool for informing people, because they didn’t have these rules. And they used it for what it was for.

As more publications, as more journalists get on the web with their own blogs, I hope that the practice of the link and proper attribution of bloggers improves dramatically. After all, it is an abrogation of a journalist’s responsibility to not do their due diligence in citing and crediting their sources appropriately, whether they deign take the blogosphere seriously or not.

In closing I offer another paragraph from Jay Rosen’s talk at the Carnegie Ethics Studio:

As a blogger what I try to do is do everything well, all the time and give you way more than you asked for every single time you come to my blog. More knowledge than you thought, more links than you bargained for, more nuance, more depth, more education than you imagined when you clicked that link.

Absolutely.

Of possible interest:
The Myth of the Parasitical Blogger at Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald echoes the sentiments I express in this piece, and notes a similar example of the mainstream media picking up story ideas from a blogger—in this case, his piece, which inspired an article in the Economist.

Maureen Dowd Gets a Pass, But in Journalism, Plagiarism Still Matters by BlogHer’s Kim Pearson offers the reaction to Dowd’s actions from the media as well as a list of past plagiarism scandals.

Id Maureen Dowd Guilty of Plagiarism? at TIME.com

Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM’s Josh Marshall at The Huffington Post

Once upon a time, questioning Greeks made their pilgrimage to Mount Parnassus to get the 411 on their situations from the Oracle at Delphi.

Of course nowadays, instead of watching the Pythia sway and prophesy in riddles to figure out what to do, all we need to do is put a couple of well-chosen words in Google and voilà!

Lost? Internet. Single? Internet. Job? Internet. Last minute dinner reservation? Internet. Need a place to crash in a strange city for under $100? Internet. What’s everyone doing? Internet. Where are they? Internet.

But just as we can find out almost anything with the internet, nowadays other people can find almost anything about us, too.

GOT GOOD GOOGLE?

Recently I got an e-mail from someone I’d written about asking whether I would remove her name from the piece I’d posted. The reason? She was applying for a job and my piece about her explosive love affair with a minor internet celebrity was showing up on searches of her name—along with all the gory details.

If Google has all the answers, it was only a matter of time before employers began using it to check up on prospective employees. A background check that requires no disclosure—who in their right mind would refuse?

Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development at New York University told The New York Times that more and more employers are checking out potential hires online.

“The term they’ve used over and over is ‘red flags’,” Steinfeld said. “Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?”

Today, Business Week says, there are two of us: “the analog, warm-blooded version of you that who presses flesh at business conferences and interprets the corporate kabuki in meetings. Then there’s the digital doppelgänger; that’s the one that is growing larger and more impossible to control every day.”

It’s this hard-to-control doppelganger that companies are worried about.

CHANGE: A SALARY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Even the Obama administration understands the weight of electronic communications. Their application for employment includes a seven-page questionnaire that leaves no stone unturned. Items 13 and 14 deal directly with online communications:

13. Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict or interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

14. Diaries: If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe

Would you mind defining “embarrassment,” Mr. President?

FAQ ON THE DIGITAL BFOQ

To get the inside scoop on what employers think about our online interactions, I chased down Rowland Hobbs, CEO at DMD Group, firm that unites integrated marketing, sustainability consulting, and experience design in New York City, and Brooks Bayne, a successful start-up developer and the brains behind The Graph, an up-and-coming new start-up in Los Angeles.

“I see this as a judgment for an employee, or potential employee,” Hobbs told me via e-mail. “If you think your brand should be about what you did on Saturday night—good, make that work for you, own that, and understand the consequences of how that communication is perceived. Make it a part of yourself that is also a part of how you sell yourself in the marketplace. You are a brand. What you say and do online reflects on you both positively and negatively. It is not a black and white issue, you have to decide how you wish to be perceived, and understand that part of your audience is your future employers and colleagues.”

Bayne was more relaxed about people’s online sharing when I interviewed him on the phone: “as long as you don’t have any hate or anything illegal in your streams, in my book you’re fine. I would hire somebody whose views I disagreed with if they were good at their job, regardless of what they posted online. If they wanna share, more power to them, as long as it’s not illegal.”

Bayne was concerned with companies telling prospective employees that being hired was contingent on deleting or making private some of their social media profiles, as well as other restrictive trends in hiring.

“If companies and the government and everyone else start to look at people online and their activities online under a magnifying glass, I think we run the risk of creating a homogenized society—one that I wouldn’t want to participate in,” he said. “As companies start basing their decisions on your blog or your Twitter stream or some other of your social profiles, I think you run the risk of creating an environment where you have a bunch of people not willing to engage online. I would hate to see people not being themselves online because they’re worried about whether or not they’re gonna get a job.”

Hobbs agreed that employees activities online should be viewed as more than a potential liability.

“Employees that participate in social media may be a great asset for your company’s communications strategies,” he told me. “Businesses should approach it as an opportunity, not a liability. Could they train your team on how to use social media effectively? Are they plugged into potential new talent, customers online that you don’t normally reach? Lots of points of opportunity here to consider. That being said, businesses should have a blogging policy in their employee handbooks to avoid ambiguity. This should be vetted with a labor attorney, but it should be part of a large communications decision. A firm should have its own perspective on how they want to be represented—and remember, choosing not to show up online can be damaging as well.”

YOU ARE WHAT YOU POST

I was 13 the first time I read George Orwell’s 1984. I will never forget the kind of anxiety that the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” inspired in me. I was online back then, too, but I was totally anonymous—there was no way to link my outrageous jailbait cyber-escapades to my 4.0 GPA-holding, honor roll-regular and student body officer self.

Back then, it was easy to be anonymous and unplug whenever you wanted. You could delete blog posts you didn’t like and poof! they were gone. Now the content is aggregated everywhere. There is no ctrl+z or apple+z. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We have short attention spans, so most of us have already forgotten it, but a quick search on Google for “intern” and “fairy” brings up the story of Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank who played hooky citing a family emergency and was caught when his boss found the Facebook pictures of Colvin from that day, dressed up as Tinker Bell, having a jolly good time. Oops!

As we chronicle more and more of our lives, as more applications are developed to make even the most mundane tasks easier, as more of us turn to social networks to reach out to one another in our mobile world, there is a definite merging of the analog and the digital.

Big Brother is watching you? Big Brother has nothing on FriendFeed.

TAKING CHARGE

When I interviewed them, I asked Hobbs and Bayne whether they could impart some advice to oversharers and millennials joining the workforce.

“Think about some of the ramifications before you post,” Bayne said.

“We encourage online communications in the way you communicate anywhere: with respect, smarts and awareness that people are indeed listening to you,” Hobbs told me. “Saying things that put you in a bad light will probably come back to haunt you. That does not mean don’t communicate online—we now preference those that do communicate online in our hiring process—but, how you communicate tells me about who you are, and your judgment.”

Less is more, they say, and Twitter takes it to heart. Twitter, the It social networking tool right now, is a micro-blog you can update 140 characters at a time, as many times as your fingers can pump out those 140-characters-or-less tidbits.

“The content that drives Twitter is a relentless stream of real-time personal status postings called tweets,” writes Scott Spanbauer in IT Business Canada. “‘Going out for more batteries,’ or ‘Feeling snacky, I think I’ll have a salad’ are the stuff of Twitter greatness–as long as tracking your friends’ ephemeral actions and mutterings is your cup of tea.”

With Twitter, you can post and receive items via the Twitter page, an application, IM, and text messages. Your tweets are archived on a personal page, they automatically show up on the pages of your friends and they can be routed to other sites like MySpace, Facebook and your blog, thereby allowing you, not only to chronicle what you’re doing, but to show the whole world what you’re up to.

If posting a blog made me feel like starting a conversation with the world, tweeting makes me feel like I’m in the middle of a huge party where everyone is having multiple conversations with everyone else at once. It’s a constant discussion of what people are doing, thinking, reading and planning that you can keep having no matter where you happen to go.

Twitter’s like the midget lovechild of a blog and a chat room. It’s simple enough that any non-techie can use it (including your mom!), it’s versatile, it’s mobile, it’s free and, apparently, in the irrational exuberance surrounding this far faster form of exhibitionism, it is also an ideal location to score n00dz from people you hardly know.*

Twitter has a page devoted to why you should care. It’s modest: “Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely. Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know. Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful. Partying? Your friends may want to join you.”

But I think it’s more than that. When a storm was tearing through the Midwest and my friends lost internet, they were able to let everyone know, with a single text, that they were doing OK. Likewise, updates from organizations like Los Angeles Fire Department, the Red Cross Safe and Well, BreakingNewsOn and What’s Shaking? can be extremely useful in case of an emergency. For those on the go, Commuter Feed uses its Twitter account to collect reports about traffic and then arranges them according to area for easy perusal.

It can be incredibly fun, too. The level of entertainment you achieve on Twitter is in your hands. Some have suggested it’s only fun if all your friends are on there, like Facebook, but I don’t agree. Twitter is that missing link between friend-whoring that goes on at MySpace and the inherent elitism of Facebook. You can follow only people you know, yes, but why not reach out to people who can make you ROTFL with their daily adventures or the innovators in your industry?

There are plenty of sites to amuse you and help you find interesting people: Twittervision, Twitterverse, Twittearth, Twittertale, Twitterbuzz, Tweetmeme, Twittertroll, Twitterholic, Tweeterboard, Hoosgot, Twitstat, Tweetscan, Twitterlinkr, TweetStats, TwitDir, TwitterSearch and Terraminds.

Our species is, more and more, a nomadic, workaholic bunch, prone to moving around too much and working long hours. Twitter is redefining what it means to be “connected.” Its simplicity is what makes it so much more effective than its wordier, bulkier older siblings (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn).

There’s no better way to cut the fat than with a 140 character limit. In fact, I think any journalism student should be forced to spend his or her first year communicating entirely on Twitter.

According to Business Week’s Stephen Baker:

Do I Twitter because I’m lazy? A few times this weekend, I’ve sat down with a laptop and thought ever so briefly about blogging. But then I wonder if the blog post is relevant, interesting enough, perhaps a tad too self-focused…. Twitter, on the other hand, is a breeze. It can be irrelevant, nakedly self-promotional…. Long story short: Blogging feels more like writing a story, and Twittering feels as free as blogging used to.

Whether you’re getting fired or watching your wife give birth, Twitter can bring hundreds of people to the center of the action, often leaving conventional online news media in the dust, as it did when YouTube went down and London was shaken up by a quake. Even NASA missions may be tweeting soon!

In an article for The Guardian, political blogger Patrick Ruffini remarked on the instantaneous nature of Twitter, “Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitter shortens it further to seconds.” Its immediacy makes it worth its weight in gold. So much so that traditional news organizations have come onboard: NYT, Reuters, CNN Breaking News, BBC News and USA Today all have Twitter accounts.

Twitter can also be used to keep track of your iPhone’s location–or that of an iPhone’s owner, to improve communication and foster relationships in academia, confess your sins, and even to help you remember when to water your plants. Of course, for those of us who’re not that tech-inclined, there’s always Sandy, the electronic personal assistant, who just so happens to have a Twitter account herself where you can easily reach her.

“Some folks use Twitter like a bullhorn, and others use it like a walkie-talkie.” writes Chris Brogran, and it’s true. You can broadcast what you’re having for lunch to the world or, if you use an @ before another user’s name in a tweet, you can direct the message to them.

Of course, everything has its critics. As Andrew Lavallee wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year, “some users are starting to feel ‘too’ connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.”

The same article quotes Microsoft blogger and hypertweeter Robert Scroble: “Twitter hate is the new black. Some haters have already come around, but to tell the truth, they do have a good point. Do you really need to know that I’m eating a tuna sandwich for lunch? Probably not, although I’ve had more than one person come over and join me for lunch because I told where I was hanging out.”

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder brushes off the critics: “Everyone says Twitter’s completely useless, I don’t want all this information. We check in later, and they’re complete addicts.”

Despite the optimism, some will never get it. Twitter’s not for everyone. When I enthusiastically told my husband I was following this really neat guy named Ryan Kuder as he was laid off from Yahoo in real time through his tweets, hubby gave an appropriately Corporate American response: 0h n0ez, more ways for employees to waste time and ZOMG, can you SAY serious information weakness?!?1!

To me, a certifiable twit in dire need of a Twittervention (is Twitter down? IS TWITTER DOWN?!), the worst part of Twitter is trying to explain its awesomeness to unimpressed non-users. Like Michelle Slatalla, who wrote a piece in the New York Times about trying to convert her three daughters and husband to Twitter, the resounding answer seems to be that I seriously need to get out more and actually, you know, talk to people.

DO NOT WANT!

I don’t care what they say, Twitter is not the social networking equivalent of crocs!

Want more info? Check out Jennifer Laycock’s step by step metamorphosis from skeptic to avid user (note that the article appears in five parts, all linked at the bottom of piece). You can play catch up with Warren Whitlock and Deborah Micek’s The Twitter Handbook or check out Sue Waters’ useful rush guide to setting up your Twitter account.

If you’re already on Twitter, check out the Twitter Fan Wiki as well as Mashable’s awesome toolbox with over 60 Twitter tools. More resources at Pink is Punk.

Oh, and PS, you’re more than welcome to add me, snooze me, or check my stats at Twitterholic, TweetStats, TwitterCounter, and Twitter.Grader!

Don’t wanna join but wanna know what’s going on? Keep an eye on what I’m talking about and what people are responding via Quotably, what people are liking on Favrd or Favotter, or scope out my tweet cloud! Already addicted? See who just unfollowed you and what the offending tweet was with Qwitter or compare trends on Twist!

* The Breasts of Twitter blog has been removed from Blogger, September 2008.