Blog (noun); see blog

My RSS reader recently pointed me to this blog entry about a French parachutist who is attempting to break the highest altitude jump record. That blog entry was quoting from a Popular Science online article which was based on a PhysOrg.com article that came from an AFP article (that I found published on Yahoo). I'm sure there are many other link-to-link-to-link chains from that same original content. It certainly seems reasonable to guess at something like 1000 re-mixes and blog entries from that one article. None added any real new content, but I suppose that bringing the information to the attention of a new group of readers is a good reason for all the republishing. Each tiny bit of information carried forward by a thousand legs -- call it "millipaedia."

Sometimes the feet seem to be marching in circles, as when a prankster updates a Wikipedia entry, only to have the new information used as content in a "traditional" press article, which is then used as a reference to "prove" the veracity of the Wikipedia edit. All of the sordid details are in this Tech Debug article, which of course got picked up by Slashdot, and a couple of thousand other blogs.

And of course, by writing (and reading) this entry, we all are just more "millipaedian" feet.