This could be the start of something great. The humans at the Sunlight Foundation have come up with a gadget that cross-references whatever you're reading against a whole slew of collected press releases and other such source material in an effort to speculate how much of it has been plagiarized. The thing seems to need a bit of fine-tuning, because the last few of my blog posts and articles checked out A-okay, and pretty much all I do is plagiarize all day long—basically just surf the information superhighway in search of material that's worth plagiarizing for money and sport.* In fact, I plagiarized this entire post.

Anyway, I learnt of this business from theAtlantic.com, whereas writer Rebecca J. Rosen—who apparently holds a far more generous estimation of how the general public vets information than I—writes:

It's not really feasible for each of us to track each piece of information to its source (nor would it be efficient), so, instead, we use clues—who wrote this, where is this published, does this square with other information we know. But the trouble is that these clues aren't perfect indicators, at least in part because even credible publications and professional journalists sometimes regurgitate information without giving it a careful vetting, a process often referred to as churnalism (just as gross as it sounds).

I should think this tool stands to greatly improve if and when it acquires the functionality to cross-reference the piece in question against other works of journalism (or blogging) already out there, but Atlantis was not built in a day. As I said in the first sentence of this blog post**, this could be the start of something great, and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.

It's like a waterboarding of information every time you turn on the internet, people—time to see who's refilling your bucket during the breaks.

*BIG money and lousy sport.
**Sometimes I plagiarize myself because I think I'm wicked smart.