Quoting Twitter

An interesting question came up yesterday as I was helping prepare some web content on how to quote things from the Internet properly. The question was: How do you quote a Tweet on Twitter?

My first feeling was - sure, if there is anything on Twitter worth quoting, it should be quotable. So we set about looking for something to quote and then figure out how to quote it properly.

We looked and looked, but I had to admit that there was nothing in my Tweetstream I felt was fitting enough to quote. So - we tweeted something in order to quote it:



Now, all we have to do is quote it. We looked and looked for how to find the status number of the tweet, it took quite sometime until we found it hidden under the time stamp. Click on it, and you get a web page with just this tweet, and the URL is the unique name with the ID number for the Tweet. So all you have to do now is write

Tweet by WeWuWiWo. http://twitter.com/WeWuWiWo/statuses/11094244580, from March 25, 2010.

Glad we got that settled. 

Me and Jesus and Dan Brown

My Google-bot just alerted me to a rather bizarre page. The Süddeutsche automatically collects information for a page about a particular topic, and has a box on the side for people associated with the topic.

This is what shows up for the German word for plagiarism: 

I rather fascinating company I keep. I can pretty much figure out why everyone is there, with the exception of Jesus....

Paper Mills

Two things in my inbox today that fit so well together, the links need to be noted here:

• Reader HD found this on China Daily: Fake papers are rife at universities. It includes a number of statistics for China and notes that teachers often write papers in order to make a living wage. Imagine getting a paper handed in that you wrote yourself....
• My Googlebot on Plagiarism keeps turning up articles at suite101.com. Yesterday's link was "The Danger of Online Essay Services" by Cynthia Jones-Shoeman. This is a rather strange site - they have a lot of great articles on proper studying, but the navigation soon sucks you into a vortex of advertising.

Students don't realize that one of the reasons they are in college is to learn to think, structure, and write. Many just want the degree to earn more money...