I pity you ParisLemon, I really do. Here's your problem, in your own words:


"The linking is really somewhat of a secondary issue here. I realize that Ars linked to Apple 2.0, as they should have. The issue is that Ars routinely takes other site's angles on stories and writes them up as if they were their own."



"Let me just be clear on something. The linking is really somewhat of a secondary issue here. I realize that Ars linked to Apple 2.0, as they should have. The issue is that Ars routinely takes other site's angles on stories and writes them up as if they were their own."



So it's ok for you to miss the original site that had this "iPhone Risk" idea but it's not ok for Ars to do it?

err, second quote should be
"And for the record here is the other site in question that talks about iPhone Risk. It is actually a really cool site, and one that I honestly didn't see before it was in the comments. I wish I would have, I certainly would have linked to them."

God do I hate blogger.

@anon - first of all, thanks for that long double quote of myself. secondly, man or woman up and don't be anon. thirdly, no the point is that I simply don't believe Ars when they say they missed my story. obviously that's going to be impossible to prove, but that is why it comes down to the history of this happening and all the people out there who stand in agreement on this issue.


I could go on, but I've been over this with too many anons. I really hope you're all not the same person.

Hey, you're offering the option, I'll do as I please.


"I simply don't believe Ars when they say they missed my story."

Great, and I don't believe you when you say that you missed the original story.

@anon - Great, write a post about it. Meanwhile I'll continue to wonder how you completely and utterly missed the point that clearly I didn't believe that Ars didn't see my story. Would I write a post about them ripping-off stories if I thought they weren't, you know, ripping-off stories? That was a really good point you made.


I look forward to your post.

"Would I write a post about them ripping-off stories if I thought they weren't, you know, ripping-off stories?"
Yep, because it brings you a ton of traffic. It doesn't matter what you believe or not, because you don't have proof and what you're describing happens everyday, not only by Ars.



Obviously it will look like Ars does it more because they're big. Prove that 0.1% of all the articles Ars posts are ripped off in terms of the idea and you have a story. Speculate with one and you've got nothing, even if a handful of bloggers claim the same.

@anon - Well here is a fact for you. I wrote about this very topic in December. It got basically no traffic. So why would I write about it again with the singular hope of getting traffic?


I'm just curious, what is your interest in this anyway? Why spend so much time going back and forth with me? Do you love Ars that much? Dislike me? Bored?



You basically just admitted that you think Ars does this at least at some level, so I'm really curious now.



That's been my favorite defense of this whole thing. "Yeah, but everyone does it."

I never said that Ars does what you claim. I said it looks like it because they're a big site.


Simple: I'm trying to show you how to become more than just another bitchmeme.



All this conversation shows is that you like to argue and spew bullshit rather than sit down and think about how to prove you're right. You're wrong until you can actually show that Ars, or any other site for that matter, is stealing "angles" from other sites.

@anon - You do know that I coined the term "bitchmeme" right? It's a little known fact that this allows me to create one whenever I wish. Glad you are here to teach me about it though.


I have to step out to meet a friend, but feel free to continue this conversation. You're doing well so far - you're almost there, I can feel it. I'll leave the blog open, just turn out the lights when you're done please.

I guess you really can't read:
"more than just another bitchmeme."

@anon - we'll if I'm reading it correctly, you are using the term incorrectly.


Sorry, gotta run for real now. See ya.

When anonymous commenters appreciate mg_siegler's work, he thanks them.


When anonymous commenters critic his work, he blames them for being anoymous ("man or woman up and don't be anon").



...



Also, please .. dont'ask your readers "Why spend so much time going back and forth with me?". This is blogging 101. You should have expected so many critic replies, and they came.





Anonymous Coward

But I'll continue to be on bullshit patrol until then.


You go, girl.

I'd like to see a list of plagiarized articles. You've made accusations that the supposed behavior is the norm for Ars Technica, but you've offered no proof.

I believe what Paris says is the gospel!

"I still have yet to hear from Ars directly on the matter"


Have you actually contacted anybody at Ars on the matter?

I'm a contributor to a known techblog. I'm not going to put my name in the hat and risk some relationships I have, so this is all the personal detail I give.


As someone who's been reading that site for like 8 years, I can predict what those guys are going to say about anything. Some of them are like broken records, my point is that Ars is consistent (good or bad, your call). They do not sit on stories for 3 days (not often at least), but do run some stories late after doing more work on them. I trust a story on Ars more than most because they have a strong track record. I do not believe that Ars steals its angles, and it will take a lot more than timestamps to prove that to me.



What I do believe is that this situation shows how easy it is to mistake one's angle for a unique angle when it wasn't. This happens to me once a month. I make a joke, take a certain spin, & someone emails my editor saying I ripped b/c they publilshed first. There really are only so many spins to take, though, and so much news.



There are definitely a few people who feel like Ars has burned them before, & they make efforts to discredit Ars on behind the scenes. I have heard from two of them & listened to one's story (he's one of the anonymous in the commenters yesterday, & he makes the same comments in every thread on the topic). Guy is angry over a lack of hat tips, which he thinks he's due, & the way Ars brushed him off when he raised it to their attention (but he also says he gets links now).



IMHO you guys are barking up the wrong tree. Ars links to sources & throws hat tips in their stories, increasingly so in the last year. They sometimes imagine bringing great insight to a story when its really only pointing out the obvious, but that's another problem (pity on the person who tries to argue with an Ars writer).



There are great offenders of the blogosphere out there, but Ars is not one of them. It gets attention because the site is very big & gets a lot of diggs. It also upsets many bloggers that Ars isn't more blogger friendly, but you are more likely to get a mention there than on news.com or wired or MacWorld.



Ars is a big site now, much bigger than when I started reading. Now Ars has to be more careful, & that's only a good thing, but they're not the jerks you make them out to be.

Here's my beef with this whole situation (disclaimer I regularly read Ars and enjoy them):


1) Maybe you're really famous and I'm unhip, but until this link storm I'd never even heard of you. You've got a blog that you write a couple of posts to a week it seems. Good for you, not hating, but it seems rather arrogant to assume that Ars writers regularly read your rants about Twitter so they can steal your ideas. It's already been shown that the Risk idea is not original to you or Ars, it hardly fair to blindly accuse them of stealing from you. It was a bit of a throw away post on Ars, posted to their journal section, by a writer who regularly makes up silly memes when covering Apple and is already sort of loved/hated for it. I tend to both sides of that myself with Jade, he's hit or miss. He did include links, as you have noted yourself, so I just don't see any intent at malice.



This isn't some unified theory of the universe you feel was stolen, frankly I think you're being unfair over a trivial coincidence. And that leads me to:



2) The worst kind of slander is the unprovable kind. I don't just mean that you can't prove Ars stole your idea here, people can at least read the two stories, see that Ars was giving links, and that your beef is that you didn't get one and draw their own conclusion. What I mean is this "I've been getting e-mails that say this happens all the time but I won't share the details". Frankly, either put up, or shut up. You're smearing a site with a whisper campaign, and it's pretty low. If there's a real issue then let the sunlight in so we can see it. Ars has been around for a decade, has a famous forum that's been home to the usual internet drama, it's not hard to imagine there are people with beefs that would love to make up stories about Ars. Be it bloggers who feel they didn't get links (sound familiar?) or banned forum personalities.



And finally, since you seem intent on following up on this:



3) You link the Mathew Ingram post, where he e-mailed Ken and got an instant response. Where is your effort to contact Ars? You seem to think that everyone at Ars reads your site on a daily basis and should be reaching out to you. I think you need to at least allow for the possibility that they've never heard of you, take the ethical high ground that you keep trying to maintain, and send some e-mails so that that this can be sorted out. Maybe you talked to some writer as you said, I don't know who that was, but the head editor seems happy to respond when people reach out to him.



I realize that you're emotionally invested in this, I'm not trying to strike at you personally here, and I've made it clear that I like Ars so I'm not trying to hide an agenda, but I really do feel like you're being unfair. I've noticed the same thing that others have noted, that in the last maybe year Ars has been linking more. You're painting them as thieves and leeches, and you just don't have any proof to offer. I don't know how many stories a day Ars really does, never counted, but it's in the double digits, there are bound to be times when similar ideas surface, or one source gets a link and another doesn't because they saw the other first etc. You're free to an opinion, but as you noted this got a lot of attention (the only reason I'm here commenting!) so it would seem to me that you owe the situation some fairness and perspective.



I read Ars because I feel like they're thoughtful, not just trying to get a scoop. Sometimes the content is original, sometimes it's commentary or analysis, and yes, sometimes it's just a summary, but they always link the original source AFAICS. I've read them for years, and watched them grow, and if they're getting Diggs or whatever it's because they worked hard to get there. I'm not aware that some big pocket guy has bought them or anything. I don't really think of Ars as a pure blog, but it seems to me they're still your peers on some level, and that you ought to give them the courtesy of treating them as such until there's more evidence that they're truly wronging people.



My 2 cents.

I've never heard of this blog before, and this is why I avoid random bloggers: the cattiness without any real fact-checking. It turns out the Ars story in question linked the original source, and this MG guy got busted doing the same thing that he accuses Ars of, but still hasn't taken down the headline calling Ars a "rip off." Apparently it's fine for him to do it, but Ars is the bad guy. The real crime, it seems, is being popular.


There are thousands of little tech blogs like this, and Ars publishes a dozen or so stories a day dealing with tech news. It should be no surprise that every now and again an opinion or piece of analysis matches up, but that's not evidence that Ars is ripping anyone off. If anything, it shows the ego of these low-level bloggers: they seem to assume that everyone is reading everything they do. The fact this story is bringing traffic to the site and the statements are libelous and without merit is kind of off putting.



You couldn't even try to e-mail or call anyone at Ars before printing this?



Put more effort into high quality reporting and check your sources and facts. That's the way to get readership, not by slinging mud at well-established sites.

@a.b. - I was going to read your extremely long narrative until I realized three sentences in that you have obviously not read the initial post or apparently any of the other posts - even the ones you cite - about this matter. this incident has nothing to do with this site.


in the future, especially when taking the time to write comments longer than the posts themselves, you may want to do that.

@anon - if you're going to pretend to be different people, maybe at least you can use different IP addresses.

"IMHO you guys are barking up the wrong tree. Ars links to sources & throws hat tips in their stories, increasingly so in the last year."


First they're barking up the wrong tree, then you admit Ars is improving? Why do you think they're improving, exactly?



Ars has more recently started offering up more outgoing links, and only because the handful of people who noticed what they were doing have been yelling at them for years about it.



I've watched them for years re-write existing content in order to pretend they were an originating source. A quick search usually turned up the piece they were rewriting without credit, complete with similar phrasing and primary points....



Despite insisting every time they're criticized that it's just a circumstantial oversight....Ars is starting to offer up more outside attribution (notice their "added reading" addition) for their inspiration, and that's great. But it's happening because folks have noticed and called them on it, not because of the arrival of mysterious Ars attribution fairies...

"Added reading" at Ars isn't new its very old they used that format years and years ago to link content. Check stuff from the 1999, 2000, 2001 era and you'll find it.

""Added reading" at Ars isn't new its very old they used that format years and years ago to link content. Check stuff from the 1999, 2000, 2001 era and you'll find it."


I stand corrected. I'm still noticing a ramp up in outbound attribution, which suggests to me a course correction.

Example of the "new" Ars:


http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080514-nbc-vista-copy-protection-snafu-reminds-us-why-drm-stinks.html



Notice the ample links to CNET and attribution.



This WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED just a year ago. The "old ARS" would have pretended they weren't using the CNET story as a primer in order to pretend they were the originating source.



It still varies by author....