Lee Gomes (Wall Street Journal) wrote a nice piece (March 1st, 2006: B1) about the race to aggregate "original content" on web sites/portals. It seems much of what is out there, in terms of original content, not published by traditional media sources, is paraphrased/plagiarised content. Editors/writers are given sources to integrate into a piece, by changing things here and there, to bypass copyright infringement filters in search engines. Cut-and-paste, search-and-replace collages passed off as "original content". Endless permutations of the same piece, integrating popular search engine keywords.

How much do you get paid to do this kind of work? $100 for 50 five hundred word articles! You get what you pay for. Even if the work is outsourced to India.

And we wonder why students are cheating...

Why do I care? "Legitimate information...risks being crowded out by junky, spammy immitations." Like email, spam is beginning to render the web useless as a publication and dissemination medium.