How News Travels on the Net (Like Driving Directions from Some Yahoo?)

Found at and hereby atriibuted to elearnspace comes this beautful grpahics and post from Stephen VanDyke on How News Travels on the Internet:

I read the Wired article Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious, and thought it was informative. But it seemed to be lacking the big picture view of how the news travels. The Blog Epidemic Analyzer was also amusing and showed how attribution is underrated, but it too seemed sorely lacking cohesion, nor was it a very new topic. So I thought to myself: “Hey this isn’t all that complicated, I should make a visual diagram to illustrate this”. And this infographic was born.

Here’s how I see news travel, I think it’s a pretty self-explanatory graphic, plus I’m too lazy to do a proper write up. Infer as you wish, maybe I will become the “source” one of these days.

Like the driving directions you get sometimes from online maps, it may or may not get you to the destination or in the best amount of time. But more so, Stephen not subtly knocks on a prevalent problem in blog-space- the sloppy and rarely done practice of giving credit and attribution to sources.

How many times do you find blog entries that are merely copies of stuff elsewhere? How often is it merely a repeat? How often as a blogger do you obsessively scrape details from your server referral log or technorati and find others are blogging about your entries and never saying so, never commetning, never TrackBacking?

What I also like about Stephen’s map is his categorizing and links provided for examples of the different nodes in this space. And then being a sarcastic humorist, Stephen lampoons himself with a follow-up map on How Drugs Travel in the Hood!

And who is that Elmo in a suit?