DailyDirt: Real Zombies...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Since it's Halloween, there are probably a lot of folks dressed up like zombies. But as we've mentioned before, Mother Nature has created a few of her own actual zombies. Here are just a few more examples.

• Did you know that the government sprays a baculovirus into the forest that can cause gypsy moth caterpillars to act reckless and even suicidal? The virus infects the caterpillars, takes over their molting genes, and re-programs the zombie caterpillars to liquify and rain contagious bodily fluids down upon other gypsy moth larvae. [url]
• North American wood frogs can survive being partially frozen (up to 70 percent of their internal water turned to ice) and twitch back to life. The frogs can stay in suspended animation for about 4 weeks, and it takes them about a day to thaw out and return to the living world. [url]
• Ants in Borneo have been found with a curious ability to explode and spew a sticky yellow glue over their enemies. The lethal sticky substance can take out other insect invaders and protect an ant colony from attack. [url]
• European paper wasps, infected by parasites, are turned into zombies that leave their hive to gather with other zombie wasps -- so that the parasites can mate. Wasps with female parasites become crazy queen wasps that fly off to infect more wasps. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: ants, caterpillar, frogs, halloween, insects, parasites, virus, wasps, zombies

DailyDirt: Weird Remedies That Just Might Work

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Sometimes it's smart to fight fire with fire. When it comes to various diseases, though, is it really a good idea to fight them off with other diseases? Vaccines are nice to have, but there are also more "symbiotic" remedies. Given that some people aren't quite comfortable eating genetically modified organisms (that are dead), it may be quite some time before most people are okay with infecting themselves with specific worms or bacteria.

Relieve your allergies/asthma/diabetes/any-autoimmune-disease with hookworms? This remedy has been around for a few years, but some folks don't have the patience to wait for FDA approval. [url]

Lose your appetite by eating roundworm eggs -- and keep your new year's weight-loss resolution. Trying this is not recommended -- exercise is way better for your long term health. [url]

Genetically modified bacteria can help fight cavities. Just replace your natural mouth flora with bacteria that don't cause cavities... but the experiment might be like Jurassic Park in your mouth. [url]

Yogurt-like drinks could prevent common bugs passed around at daycare. This yogurt-related study sponsored by Dannon should probably be taken with a grain of salt.... [url]

Sickle cell anemia seems to have been naturally selected for fighting malaria. Trading one disease for another isn't really a new thing. [url]

Filed Under: hookworms, parasites, remedies

NY Post Reporter Admits That It's Company Policy Not To Credit Blogs Or Other Sources

from the parasites? dept

Remember that Washington Post reporter last month who got all sorts of attention for claiming that a Gawker writer "ripped off" his story, despite linking to it multiple times? Many mainstream press folks sided with Shapira, in using this as an example of how blogs "parasite" newspapers. Yet, as the actual numbers show, the real relationship is quite symbiotic, with stories moving back and forth across alternative media and traditional media. And... it seems pretty clear that alternative media is a lot more likely to give credit and/or link to an original story. We've highlighted a few different cases of those traditional newspapers taking stories from bloggers without credit.

Charles Vestal points us to another such case, but in this one, the reporter confessed and noted that it was company policy not to credit bloggers. In this case, it involved a local New York City blog that goes by the charming name NewYorkShitty.com. Last month, it reported on an illegal gym in the neighborhood. A little over a week later, the big News Corp/Rubert Murdoch-owned NY Post wrote an article covering just that story that seemed pretty obviously taken straight from the original.

So, the author of the blog post, one "Miss Heather" contacted one of the NY Post reporters, who quite openly admitted to using the blog post for his story, and then said it's against corporate policy to credit bloggers with scoops. Apparently, the same applies at the NY Daily News as well:

Post policy prevented me from crediting you in print. Allow me to do so now. You did a fantastic reporting job. All I had to do was follow your steps (and make a few extra phone calls).

I won't discuss at length the policy of not crediting blogs (or anyone else). I'll just briefly explain that as long as we can independently verify every bit of info, we don't credit.

Now, this isn't a surprise, but how come that Washington Post reporter's claims of blogs being "parasites" got so much attention a few weeks ago, when it involved a clear case where the blog quite deliberately cited and linked to the original -- but a situation like this, where the NY Post blatantly got the story from a blog and admits it, doesn't get any attention at all?

Filed Under: bloggers, citations, credit, journalism, ny post, parasites
Companies: news corp.

Why Don't Newspapers 'Parasite' Themselves?

from the hello,-competition... dept

With all the misleading claims about blogs and other sites acting as "parasites" or ripping off the news, there's a really good question that the big media properties don't seem to want to answer. If these sites are really attracting so much traffic... why not build one yourself? Over at E-Media Tidbits, Amy Gahran discusses how that might work:

While many journalists are attached to long-form stories delivered in a traditionally detached and serious tone, that doesn't necessarily align with how more and more people actually consume media and news.

So why not offer both approaches on a news site? Rather than wait for (or actively solicit) popular venues such as Gawker or "The Daily Show" to imbue labor-intensive, in-depth reporting with mass appeal, news organizations could instead present their own briefer, more lighthearted takes on longer stories and increase the chances of driving traffic and engagement to the original stories.

If those other sites really get all the attention, then come up with a way to bring the attention back. That's what we normally think of as competition. If the car dealer across the street is having a blow out Labor Day sale, you don't complain about them "parasiting" your customers. You come up with a promotion yourself.

Now, to be fair, my guess is that the response to this is that would only add more expense on top of what's already being done, without a guaranteed payoff. Also, part of the complaint (at least from the Marburgers) isn't so much that these sites get all the traffic, but that they drive down ad rates for the long form journalism. Of course, if that's true (and it's not clear it is), then the answer is again to focus on coming up with creative ways to expand your audience/community or to make them more valuable to advertisers. And, certainly building a better community around more "webby" type content wouldn't hurt...

Filed Under: blogs, copying, newspapers, parasites

More Examples Of Newspapers 'Parasiting' Blogs

from the and-again-and-again-and-again dept

I think this particular angle has been played out with a few previous examples, but I did want to post one final example of how common it appears for newspapers to copy stories from blogs without giving any credit at all. If Ian Shapira was upset that Gawker "only" gave him three links, I wonder what he feels about a long list of newspapers taking a story from a blog and giving no credit at all (found via Mathew Ingram). The story involves the news that the military is banning the use of certain social networks -- a story researched and broken on a blog by Noah Shachtman, but in newspaper after newspaper after newspaper after newspaper, no such credit is given. As the original link above points out, this is part of an outdated view of "journalism":

This isn't the fault of any individual reporter. It's the fault of an outdated newspaper convention that equates proper referencing with an admission of professional failure. Before the internet, it was pretty easy to get away with slighting your colleagues. But now that everyone has GoogleNews at their fingertips, it looks like exactly what it is: churlish and archaic vanity. Everyone can see who got the story first. Not a single reader, I'll bet, will ever say, "Aha! Because Noah Shachtman got the story first, clearly Julian Barnes is an inferior reporter!"

I don't even think it's that big of a deal. But it's just how stories spread. No one "owns" the news. Giving credit where credit is due is a nice and neighborly (online) thing to do (which is why we always try to credit where we found a story or who alerted us to it), but in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty meaningless overall. It's pretty silly to suddenly be making a big deal of it -- and the only reason to do so appears to be some newspaper folks who can't figure out how to fix things, and instead are lashing out at anyone else who seems to be getting attention. First it was Craigslist. Then Google. Now blogs. But none of that actually solves the newspapers' problem of building business models for the twenty-first century.

Filed Under: journalism, newspapers, parasites

Mainstream Newspapers 'Rip Off' Blogs Too, You Know...

from the it's-not-just-one-way... dept

Last month, we wrote about a new study that basically showed that independent bloggers and the mainstream press had a rather nice symbiotic relationship, with different stories flowing back and forth across the two. Oddly, the NY Times misinterpreted the study to claim that it showed that bloggers were "behind" the mainstream press on stories, but the details showed a very different story. It's no surprise that a mainstream publication would portray the study this way, but it makes it even more amusing when that same publication is then caught using a story from a blog as well, without doing any additional reporting.

Now, before we get into the details, I want to be absolutely clear: I don't think there is anything wrong with this at all. You can't (and shouldn't be able to) copyright facts, and having multiple versions of a story written up from multiple perspectives is a good thing in my book. But with some, such as the Marburgers, insisting that its these independent sites acting as "parasites" and you have Ian Shapira and his editors at the Washington Post complaining about Gawker supposedly "ripping off" one of Shapira's articles, it's worth noting that this happens all the time in the other direction as well.

Eric Goldman alerts us to a blog post by writer/blogger Kashmir Hill, where she talks about how the NY Times did the exact same thing that Shapira accuses Gawker of doing to a blog post she wrote for the blog AboveTheLaw. The story is actually one that we blogged about as well (and linked to the AboveTheLaw version, along with two other blogs that led us to the original story), concerning a professor who gave his class an assignment to see what sort of private info they could find online about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (following Scalia's claim that there was no need to protect privacy online).

It was an interesting story that got plenty of attention, and involved real reporting by Hill, including talking to both the professor and actually getting a quote from Scalia via the Supreme Court. From there, a bunch of mainstream sources, starting with ABC News, but also including the NY Times wrote up their own versions of the story. They did no real additional reporting. They did cite AboveTheLaw as the source, but also used quotes directly from Hill's piece.

Again, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do -- but according to Shapira, this is the NY Times "ripping off" Hill and according to the Marburgers, this is the NYTimes acting as a "parasite." Does it occur to either of them that this is just part of how news is written about these days? Stories originate in all sorts of places, and then go through a variety of different sources.

Filed Under: blogs, copying, kashmir hill, newspapers, parasites

Marburgers Repeat Nonsense, While We Look More Closely At Those Darn Parasites

from the what-harm? dept

The Marburger brothers, who first got some attention when a newspaper columnist in Cleveland misrepresented their "plan" to save newspapers, have been working hard to get their story straight. But a more detailed look at their plan shows that it's quite lacking and nothing more than artificial protectionism for an obsolete business model. Furthermore, they seem to be fighting a phantom that isn't there -- claiming that piracy is some sort of problem when there's no evidence that it's a significant problem at all.

But they're still at it -- and it should come as no surprise that newspapers are more than willing to give them column space for it. The LA Times has allowed them to publish a condensed version of their plan as an op-ed, where they go on and on about free riders, but fail to show what the actual problem is. They name one (count 'em) actual "free rider" in the site Newser, which takes popular stories and shrinks them down to a summary and a link. The thing is, Newser doesn't get a huge amount of traffic -- and it appears to be dropping. And, let's see... compared to just LATimes.com, Newser.com is a tiny blip, and they're moving in opposite directions. LATimes is increasing in traffic, and Newser is decreasing.

You want to know why?

Because what Newser provides isn't particular worthwhile. If a "free rider" destroys your business by summarizing your news article in two paragraphs, you don't have much of a business. Fortunately, most news sites do provide at least some more value than a two paragraph summary, which is why Newser doesn't get much traffic. So, again, we have to ask David and Daniel Marburger to explain to us where is the actual harm here? Why should we change copyright law to deal with a problem that doesn't seem to exist?

Filed Under: aggregators, copyright, daniel marburger, david marburger, first amendment, hot news, marburgers, newspapers, parasites

Is There Really A 'Piracy' Problem For Newspapers?

from the totally-overblown dept

A few years ago, newspapers were all blaming Craigslist for their own business model problems. Then, of course, it became popular to blame Google. However, there's been an odd shift recently, to a claim that the problem is from "pirates" and "parasites." We see this in the AP's sudden desire to DRM the news by tracking how it's used and going after those it feels are using its content unfairly. We see it in the Marburger brothers' plan to put legal pressure on "parasitic aggregators." The problem, as we discussed, however, is that these parasitic aggregators are few and far between and the complaints against them just don't ring true at all.

Being a "publisher" of sorts, this is actually an area we have some experience with. As we've noted many times, there are plenty of "parasitic aggregators" (we usually refer to them as "spam blogs") that copy all our content. We track them, just because they tend to show up in searches, and one thing quickly becomes clear: they get little to no traffic at all, and any advertising revenue they bring in has to be close to nil. The average lifespan of such sites is usually about 3 months before they go away, and the argument that they take money away from us is silly. If anyone sees those copied posts, it doesn't take long to figure out that Techdirt is the originator of the content, and from that to learn it's probably easier/faster/better to just read the content here -- plus, by reading it here, they get to take part in the conversation that's actually happening here. The Marburgers admit that any one of these parasitic aggregators might not bring in that much money, but in aggregate (yes, aggregating the aggregators), they represent a substantial loss. Yet, they offer no evidence of that whatsoever, and as a publisher whose content is regularly used in this manner, I've seen no evidence that this is a real problem at all from a revenue standpoint.

Of course, that's the lowest of the "low" on these parasitic aggregators. But the Marburgers' define parasitic aggregators to include sites that don't have reporters on the scene, but still have journalists who write up stories based on others' reporting. But, oddly, the properties it names, such as Newser and The Daily Beast are both relatively small -- and both try to position themselves as sort of "premium" sites, rather than (as the analysis implies) ones trying to push down CPM ad rates. If these sites are taking away any traffic from major media sites, it's minimal at best, and it's quite unlikely they're really putting any pressure on newspaper ad rates.

It really just seems like a problem that isn't there.

But adding a bit more fuel to the fire, recently, was an article in the NY Times that read more like a press release from a company called Attributor (who's been banging this misguided drum for years), where it claims that a recent study found "publishers were losing $250 million a year from unauthorized copying." This number is creating all sorts of questions and controversy. And, it should. Because the number is bunk. Attributor is pretty cagey with how it came up with the numbers, but it involved looking at how many pages were "copied" from 25 major publications and then extrapolating out to other media sites. Even companies that work with Attributor think the claims are ridiculous. On top of that, even if you grant the premise on these "losses," that still represents a tiny amount of money spread across the entire industry.

But, just as with the music industry and its complaints about "piracy," this is yet another case of people falsely declaring sales not made (or, in this case, ad impressions not loaded) as being "losses." The reality is that you don't know if people would have seen the content otherwise. And you don't know if, having viewed the content at one of these other sites, they aren't later convinced to just go directly to the source. Like music "piracy" the issue isn't "parasites" or aggregators "free-riding." The problem is the originating sites not adding enough value to make it worthwhile to visit them, rather than using one of these other (still tiny) sites. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you're a publisher, and someone paraphrasing your content is enough to keep people away from your site, you're not doing a very good job adding enough value on your site to get folks to visit.

This is a problem that just doesn't exist. It's being blown way out of proportion. There is no real problem with "parasites" or "pirates" when it comes to news content. It's a distraction, and publications that spend a lot of time or money on it, will find that they're taking their eyes off the real issue: providing value to bring in more users and adapting to the new media marketplace.

Filed Under: aggregators, journalism, marburgers, newspapers, parasites, piracy

More Double Standards On Journalist Entitlement

from the wait-a-second... dept

We've been hearing all of these stories about the importance of extending copyright further over news content and how mainstream publications can't handle other publications acting as "parasites" -- using their news without paying.... And at the same time, there seems to be a huge double standard. Apparently people are questioning the journalistic ethics of ESPN for offering to pay $500 for the Lebron James dunk video, which made some news recently when James supposedly tried to suppress it.

However, the bigger point here is: smaller publications are considered parasites for rewriting a story from a major publication leading people to put forth proposals that these sites pay the original publication. But... when it comes to a video from an independent entity, it's suddenly an ethics violation to pay the copyright holder? In the first case you have company A (the major publication) demanding money from company/person B (the indie publication) for "using" their work. In the second case you have people saying that it's unethical for company/person B to get money from company A for using their work.

Can someone please explain how that's not a double standard?

When the mainstream publication is reporting it's unethical to pay for copyrighted material? But when another publication writes a story (not copies it, even) based on reporting from a mainstream publication, it's suddenly a violation? By the mainstream publications' own reasoning, wouldn't accepting money from these "parasites" be just as unethical? After all, those smaller publications would now be paying for news, which apparently is incredibly unethical in the mainstream journalism book...

Filed Under: ethics, journalism, parasites, paying

Is The BBC An AP Parasite?

from the just-wondering... dept

Over the last few months we've been hearing all these claims about how various "aggregators" and internet sites that simply rewrite articles from "mainstream" publications are somehow "parasites." But, of course, that ignores the fact that many of those mainstream publications do the exact same thing themselves. So, for example, earlier this week, there was a cute AP article getting passed around about a girl by the name of Kelly Hildebrandt who was bored one night and looked on Facebook for anyone else with her name, and found that the only other one was actually a guy. One thing led to another, and now they're getting married to each other (awwwww.) Anyway, not long after that, I saw that the BBC appears to have a very similar article, and it's quite clear that all they did was rewrite the AP's article. At one point, they do credit the AP, but the article is almost a direct paraphrase of the AP's. So does the AP start calling the BBC a parasite, too? Or does it finally realize that no one owns the news, and lots of publications often rewrite the news and have for ages?

Filed Under: journalism, news, parasites, rewriting
Companies: associated press, bbc