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.