Street Tech

There’s an interesting article over at Wired about how Google and blogging in general are responsible for the trend of larger blogs picking up themes and even direct quotes from smaller blogs without attribution. What’s even more funny about the story is that they mention one of the items that we blogged months ago as an example: the Giant Microbes stuffed toys, for which I’m fairly certain we were as much of an original source as anyone can be on the Internet.

But the point of the article is that smaller sites get no attribution for trendsetting or coming up with the stories, and to counteract that researchers have come up with a system designed to find the original sources called “irank”. Aside from the incredibly bad name, we think this is a good way to upend the Google hegemony, especially since we think we’d be “among the rankest,” and that’s just where we’re used to being.

Pete Rojas, former editor of the online gadget blog Gizmodo has gone out on his own to start Engadget, which is for all intents and purposes a complete copy of Gizmodo. That’s too bad; Gizmodo under Rojas’ stewardship was the premier gadget blog, but has turned of late into a simple rehash of press releases. Engadget looks like it’ll be the same as the old Gizmodo, with the crafty editorial tone that Rojas brought to it, but it also doesn’t seem to be anything more than gadgets. That leaves both competing in the exact same space, biting entries from one another in a “blog blogging itself” circularity. Pity.

In any case, we here at StreetTech wish Rojas and the team at Engadget luck in their new project. We’ve already readjusted our bookmarks..