I haven't really been following the Ian McEwan plagiarism ordeal, but I happened upon (i.e. Google News pointed me toward) this article in the UK's Daily Telegraph. McEwan has been accused of plagiarizing multiple portions of a WWII nurse's memoir for his 2002 book Atonement.

Plagiarism is obviously a rich issue, but the main point I want to raise here is about its relationship to advancing technology. It's easy to imagine a future in which plagiarism (at least of the physical, word-for-word kind) would be impossible to get away with, for any amount of time. Not only will there be more people accessing and commenting upon written works, but, as more and more is digitized, there seems the opportunity for immediate, thorough and computerized cross-referencing. Will we then search more vigorously for writers to ostracize for plagiarism of ideas?

In doing some research for my own final project, I came across the website for a course at Sarah Lawrence College that spends the whole semester reading about and learning how to do pretty much exactly what I've proposed to do for this final project in a little over a month. Of particular interest for our class in general is the page from which you can access all the students' final projects; like us, they had to create online content, it could be critical or creative, and is generally hypertextual in form. It's useful to look at all the variations this group of students came up with, and to see what turned out well and what definitely didn't.

Just FYI, here's a set of links to many aspects of media theory and how texts change in different media. Just stumbled onto it!

Checking this later, I find that a lot of links are broken. The Michael Joyce article is there, however: very dense, almost telegraphic, but interesting, as usual.

http://palinurus.english.ucsb.edu/BIBLIO-it-and-academy+historical.html

I realized that I didn't do any linking in my previous post, so here's an addendum of sorts. I've found it hard to get into personal blogs (ironic considering that I just posted a fairly long personal story about blogs), so I tried searching for blogs about some of my interests, which seems to be something of a common approach here. I settled on music, so I went searching for music blogs.

A number of music blogs seem to be personal blogs that happen to link to mp3s. A good example of this is the horribly named Rawkblog. Much like your typical personal blog, whoever keeps this blog seems to seek approval through posting music that establishes him or her as some kind of music connoisseur. Additionally, the author attempts to establish a relationship between his or her personal life and the music that is posted.

Two stories briefly managed in class:

Apple sues Bloggers
Long Tail Economics and Scoble's take on it (you know, Scoble)

Also, don't forget to check out odeo.