Tim O'Reilly recently observed the spontaneous arisal in Twitter of the idioms of "retweet" or "RT", i.e. tagged repost, and "via", indicating from whom the poster got his information. Human social wiring provides a strong motivation not to be seen as a status thief, so it actually would have astounded me if somehow using the medium of short text messages was able to defeat the normal human urge to give attribution.
However, there is also another relevant human urge: To steal when one can get away with it.
I do wonder how may retweets and vias are not tagged. And I also wonder what would happen to those rates once a search service to detect plaigarism were made public. A determined thief would then, presumably, start rewording their plagiarism so that it was harder to detect. In the words of the great Tom Lehrer:
Plagiarize! Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes, so don't shade your eyes, but
Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize!
... but be sure always to call it, please, "research."
And yes, I'm sure I'd be caught if I tried to take credit for that.
