Retweeting may be Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a fine line to some and clear-cut to others. As a total troll on twitter, see @bvolk34 (notice link) I rarely have anything original to say.When I do say something it is normally very personal and only meant for a select crowd, i.e. friends or family.

So this brings to question,if you always retweet other peoples material from the web while never doing anything original are your “retweets” plagiarism?”

I personally think not, however I’m not naive enough to believe the more educated scholar wouldn’t see this as a form of thievery. In todays gotta have it now world it seems everyone is willing to link an article or post to their blog in order to get the quick hit in the hopes of better exposure. I’m not faulting people who do this, I understand it, however at the end of the day who gets credit for the original post or article inevitably is the person who makes money.Making money from this type of media is getting more and more competitive, even people who didn’t think it was anything but fun and games six or seven years ago are starting to wonder if there isn’t some revenue to be made.

I personally love legitimate news sites like NY Times and the Washington Post, but when most people link to legitamte news articles from paid journalists how do they make money for their effort? In case no one has noticed theirs a lot of print newspapers and magazines struggling to make it in today’s world. While a lot of aggregating sites like Gawker (notice no link) are just plain ripping off these legitimate news sources. Simply stating you pilfered the article from a news source which has paid journalists is not going to cut it in the future. What’s gonna happen when these sources demand to be paid for doing their jobs? How will these aggregating websites make a go of it when it costs them money to get content?

I’m not going to pretend I’m making money on a personal blog but it’s something to think about when linking to another persons work. In the social media world ones online identity is everything a fair amount of people are making money just being themselves. How long this will last is anyone’s guess at some point substance becomes a issue.