TechWag

Interesting way to wake up this morning is to see that Demo has made noise that Jason Calcanis pulled a “what everyone should know about pitching your startup” saying that it was very similar to something that was written 10 years ago for Demo. So taking a quick look at what is there, the scary part is that if a student had turned this in, Turitin would have passed it, there would have been nothing similar in the academic databases like Proquest, Emerald Insight, Gale, or even in Google or Google Scholar.

There is nothing in Google or Archive.org about the file, it would have been considered an original work by the student, or by just about anyone, Jason Calcanis would have gotten an A in the class, well done Jason!

The Demo file with the title provided “What the DEMO Gods Know that Smart Entrepreneurs Should Learn” was not in any of these systems, and it sailed through its plagiarism check using Turitin. The student would have gotten an A for that one. Well now that it is all over the internet (there were a lot of returns for the Techcrunch article and how badly it is has been thrown around the internet) Google returns a whole pile of stuff.

Note to Techcrunch: wow you folks get your stuff ripped a lot.

Here are the pictures from Turitin, I marked out my name, not that it means anything, but that big ugly blue blotch is me blocking out my name. Not that I am anonymous at all really, and not that some security person or intrepid hacker can’t remove the overlay using Photoshop, it just felt good to block out my name.

Here is the Google search return, my thoughts on this are if the document had existed on the web site for years, it should have shown something in Google, unless I have completely missed what Google cache is all about.

Not to be deterred, went to archive.org they should have a copy, they have a lot of stuff from the early Web 1.0 days, this is the return, there is some humor here that I got one return on the system, and it was centered on the word “Glitch”

Certain amount of amusement here, plagiarism is a serious issue, but if the academic and Google/live/yahoo do not return any information (and I know that Google goes back to 1998, cause there is stuff from me in there), and no one ever ripped the file “What the DEMO Gods Know that Smart Entrepreneurs Should Learn” and posted it on the internet, that is a pretty amazing occurrence. Archive.org did not have a copy of the file, and that is pretty amazing that it is nowhere in its original form. This is the kind of stuff that someone would have written and commented on, even in the heady days of 1998/1999 it would have been everywhere, and Google was around in 1999 too.

Tags: demo, Techcrunch, plagiarism, Turitin, academic, database, Google, interesting

Tags: web 2.0, education, technology, Participation, data mine, business //