iThenticate Blog

Pseudo Journals and Fake Banks, What Publishers Can Learn

From a search engine ranking perspective, social media sites tend to do well because they promote sharing content among users.  Pinterest, the newest craze in social media, doesn’t exactly seem to fit into the same mold. Users are more often than not “pinning” images that are not theirs to post, an act that is viewed by many as plagiarism, and potentially seen by stock photography agencies as copyright infringement.

One of the most valuable tools that bloggers and digital content publications use as a source for edits is their user community. When a writer or organization either doesn’t have the resources for a standard editor or can’t cover the sheer volume of published works, they can  turn to their readers to point out grammatical errors, perform fact checking, and even scan content for cases of plagiarism.

Joseph Esposito from the ‘Scholarly Kitchen’ wrote an interesting piece on social media and the evolution of the ‘fixed text.’ He analyzes the newly dynamic nature of the social web; from edits within Wikipedia to comments on a blog to multifaceted posts on Google Plus. Essentially, we are moving away from a time when a piece of content was easily defined, with a convenient start and finish.

Mashable.com published a very interesting article on the growing phenomenon of journalistic curation.  A curator is someone who acts as a medium between journalists / publications and readers.