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Peeve of the day: Cascading attributions

One thing has begun to irritate me more than a little bit: Bloggers and other online posters who point to a posting on another site without bothering to check the source. If you're interested in tracing back the attribution to read the original article, you'll often find that blogger A has linked to blogger B, which found the link on another site, which in turn sourced the story from another site.

What you also find is that this is the blogging equivalent of the Surrealist parlor game "exquisite corpse," where players would assemble bizarre sentences by linking together parts of speech. It's possible for one blogger to misinform or misinterpret what he or she has read or seen, and that difference gets amplified and further distorted the further away from the original source the information gets.

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