A diagram created by the author.

Editors’ Choice: The Georgian Pingbacks Project

In the wild west of the World Wide Web, if you compose a hilarious joke, provide a simple solution to a complex problem or break a major new story, it is almost certain that your work will be copied. Although intellectual property laws exist, they are inconsistently enforced because of the sheer number of sites where reposting occurs – a number that increases with each passing second. If you are lucky, and your re-poster is honest, you may discover how far your ideas have spread through a pingback, an automatically generated comment on your original blog post with a link to its reprint.

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