Glenn Greenwald has an interesting post about the Maureen Dowd plagiarism drama in, The myth of the parasitical bloggers:

I raise this only to illustrate how one-sided and even misleading is the complaint that bloggers are "parasites" on the work of "real journalists." Often, the parasitical feeding happens in the opposite direction, though while bloggers routinely credit (and link to) the source of the material on which they're commenting, there is an unwritten code among many establishment journalists that while they credit each other's work, they're free to claim as their own whatever they find online without any need for credit or attribution (see here for a typical example of how many of these news organizations operate in this regard).

It's difficult to quantify, but a large percentage of political reporters, editors, television news producers, and on-air pundits read political blogs or other online venues now. Many do so precisely because blogs are a prime source for their story ideas. Contrary to the myth perpetrated by establishment media outlets, there is substantial original reporting, original analysis and the like that takes place on blogs. That's precisely why so many journalists, editors and segment producers read them.

I had exactly the same experience of finding a journalist from a "reputable news outlet" take once again one of my posts and write out a whole article and never give me attribution. This has happened countless times during my almost 8 years of blogging, but this last one really annoyed the hell out of me. Take a look at my post, It's the end of the world as we know it, and compare it to, Civil War Raging in Right-Wing Blogosphere, an article that appeared on the Washington Independent exactly 7 days after. You can't tell me the author didn't happen to read my post when a lot of the sources he cites are almost all the ones I quote on my post.

As Glenn says, this is not illegal. I have to say though that is exasperating as hell to find yet again another idiot who won't link back to my work for whatever reason. Even if it is somewhat soothing to find out that even guys like Glenn Greenwald and Josh Marshall have assholes doing the same to them. Because the point of this drama is not so much that we bloggers are a source of original reporting. That's a given. What is little discussed is the reason why we have journalists stealing our content: It's not for what we write that they steal our content. They steal our ideas and even our content exactly because our social capital is so much higher than the social capital of journalists.

In other words, we are truly trusted sources. Journalists? Not so much.
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SAY WHAT!

My blog brother Chris Rabb has some startling news! From Afro-Netizen: Afro-Netizen LLC acquired by KBR for $47.3 million:

Many rumors have persisted in recent weeks about Afro-Netizen's ownership and plans for the future.

In an effort to end such speculation, it is with great delight that we announce that of March 31, 2009, Afro-Netizen LLC has been acquired by the U.S. firm KBR for $47.3 million.

OMFG! I have to call him now
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Why is it that Firefox has a debugging add-on that supports Drupal development but we yet have to see a Drupal add-on that supports writing for a Drupal site? It's in times like this I so wish I were a coder.

The problem arises with the myriad of input formats Drupal has just by default (forum, blog, story) that gets complicated when you then throw in the forms for Event and or Calendar, Image, Audio, Video, Storylink, Quotes, Recipes, and all the customized formats possible with the Content Construction Kit (aka, CCK).

And then there's the little detail of taxonomies.

ScribeFire works amazingly well just for the blog, page, story, formats AND only if you have a relatively small amount of categories (in the low hundreds). If you have more than 300 categories, the add-on is incapable of reading them all. Not only that, when it does read the categories it outputs them as selections --it really doesn't allow you to search through all your categories and choose only the ones you need. It neither allows you to add new ones on the fly.
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Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch wrote an "intervention" post for Robert Scoble about his addiction to FriendFeed (and by extension Twitter).

What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

So lots of people follow Robert on those services, but they aren’t visiting his site and the content he writes is on someone else’s server. Plus all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about.

Meanwhile, all this attention from Robert has certainly helped the valuations of Friendfeed and Twitter. How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch.

So Robert has spent 2,555 hours spent reading tens out thousands of mostly inane Twitter and Friendfeed messages, and has written a few thousand messages of his own. Meanwhile, we as a community lost the regularly entertaining and thoughtful posts of a great writer.

Robert dutifully responded over at Scobleizer :
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Slides of the presentation Chris Rabb and I gave at "Facing Race" on both 2007 and 2008.

I am getting that seasonal antsy feeling. I need to shake things around with my writing and bring more variety. About a month ago I suggested to my peeps David and Michael that I'd love to give each day of the week a theme. I don't necessarily need other contributors to enter the fray --am down with everybody posting whatever they are good at. Yet I am finding that I personally need more structure in order to introduce more variety ... and I hope that makes sense.

Anyhow, here's what I will be experimenting with during the next few weeks :
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• Market Monday : Anything and everything having to with economics, finances, sales, marketing... I'll even sneak in some product development if need be.
• Tech Tuesday : All tech all day. I have been trying to get more technology writing in the blog, and this is going to be the day I do that.
• Feature Wednesday : Anything exciting or worthy of a change of our banner will be featured every Wednesday. It's time to bring Barack's mug off the blog and that's going to happen this Wednesday.
• Thirsty Thursday Yes. Booze, coffee, tea, juices, and the food to go with these libations. Anything liquid in bounty or in crisis as in "The Worldwide Water Crisis". I've found out through my blogging for Kenneth Cole there's a HUGE water crisis all around the world and that most of it is not related to global warming but to natural resource poaching by big corporations like Coca-Cola. I am definitely using Thursdays to focus on the water wars happening around the world.