The Indian sites will join Gawker’s new Spanish-language version of Gizmodo — which launched on Monday — as well as local versions of various Gawker sites that have launched in Brazil, Hungary and the United Kingdom. In some cases, as with India, the local sites are run by partners in that country, and consist of translated blog posts from the U.S. site as well as some local content created by those partners.

Gawker’s partner in Brazil — a media entity called F451 — runs native versions of four Gawker sites (Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jezebel and Jalopnik) while the company’s partner in Japan runs just a local version of Gizmodo. And in Hungary, the Gawker presence consists of a site called Cink.hu, which isn’t really a copy of any of the blog network’s other sites and is run by Laszlo Szily, who worked for Denton when the Gawker founder was a Financial Times correspondent in Hungary.

Gizmodo’s new Spanish site and the Hungarian site are new variations on the model because they aren’t based on partnerships with local operators like the Times of India — they are both owned and operated by the U.S. company, using staff who write in the other language (although both will also run translated versions of Gawker content). Some of the staff at Gizmodo’s new Spanish version are based in New York and others in Spain, a result of Gawker’s recent acquisition of a local Gawker-style site called Guanabee, whose founder now runs Gizmodo en Espanol.

Gawker wants international to be 20 percent of revenue

I asked Denton whether the company is expanding internationally because growth in the U.S. market has slowed and he said no — according to the Gawker CEO, the blog network says it expects to see 40-per-cent growth in 2013, an even faster rate than it saw in 2012, although Denton didn’t say whether that was revenue or some other metric (Update: Denton clarified to me via Twitter that he meant revenues). He also said he wants to take international revenues to 20 percent of Gawker’s sales from the 5-per-cent level they are at currently, and that international deals are much more lucrative for Gawker because the profit margins are higher,.

As for what comes next, Denton said China is the biggest hole in Gawker Media’s portfolio of international properties. The company has been trying to set something up there but hasn’t been able to find the right local partner yet, he said, and therefore it may need to publish Chinese content from somewhere outside the country if it wants to make inroads into that market.

Denton also said that the company’s new Kinja platform has been a big part of the expansion, since it allows Gawker sites to host more active conversations and discussions than the previous version — including discussions that are sponsored by advertisers. Gawker launched the new platform last year, and Denton told me in an interview at the time that the focus on discussions awas going to be a big part of the future of Gawker.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Growing pains in the solar PV industry
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Last month, the blog Newsbusters discovered that a large chunk of a piece that Zakaria wrote for Time magazine about gun control was almost identical to sections from a New Yorker piece on the same topic, written by Jill Lepore. Zakaria was subsequently suspended by both Time and CNN (although he has recently been reinstated after both entities said they found no evidence of further plagiarism). Lehrer, meanwhile — a high-profile author — was fired by resigned from the New Yorker after it was discovered that he had duplicated information from a number of sources.

Plagiarism is just inefficient hyperlinking

One of the themes that has been brought up repeatedly in stories about both Zakaria and Lehrer is the idea that they have been overworked as a result of media multi-tasking. Stories about the Lehrer incident, for example, note that he was writing books and had a packed public-speaking schedule while also trying to write a blog for the New Yorker, and Zakaria made the same link by saying he plans to cut down on his responsibilities — implying that this was to blame for him mixing up his notes from the New Yorker piece with his own writing (he also said he recently hired an assistant).

But I think Box.net CEO Aaron Levie put his finger on a big part of the problem in a tweet he posted recently, in which he said plagiarism “is just really inefficient hyperlinking.”

Plagiarism is just really inefficient hyperlinking.

—
Aaron Levie (@levie) August 10, 2012

Although he probably just intended to be witty, I think Levie makes a good point. Plagiarism is defined as the attempt to “steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one’s own,” and it is the last part of that definition that is the most important one. It isn’t so much that a writer like Lehrer or Zakaria takes information from someone else and uses it in a column — plenty of writers do that, and as the media world has exploded thanks to social tools such as blogs and Twitter, this phenomenon has only become more commonplace. But neither of them gave credit to the source of the content they used, and that was the real crime.

This is exactly the same kind of argument that gets made about news aggregators or blogs that do a poor job of crediting the source of the content they are aggregating. As Jeff Jarvis has argued in a series of recent posts, since copying is rampant on the internet, we should be more focused on ways of giving credit to the source or creator of that content. And what better way to give credit than by linking prominently to its originator? This is just another reason why links are the lifeblood of the internet, as I argued in a recent post about the back-and-forth between bloggers and the traditional media over the latter never giving credit to the former.

Linking also provides a great defence

If either Zakaria or Lehrer had been more devoted to the idea of linking to sources, they might have spent more time making note of where the information they were using came from, so that they could include a link — in the same way that academics routinely cite footnotes to back up their claims. Would they still have tried to pass those sections off as their own? Perhaps. As my paidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted about Lehrer, some of his behavior was likely a result of the pressure to be a public intellectual. But if either one is sincere about how their plagiarism was an honest mistake, paying more attention to linking might help.

And if anyone needs evidence of how a consistent policy of linking to sources can be a positive thing, they should look no further than the Gawker case: the blog network was sued by a company for defamation, based on a piece that the tech blog Gizmodo wrote about its products. In a decision that acquitted the media company of this charge, the court said that part of the rationale for its ruling came from the use of links in the Gizmodo piece, which provided ample evidence of what the post was referring to. As the court decision put it:

“Having ready access to the same facts as the authors, readers were put in a position to draw their own conclusions about Redmond and his ventures and technologies… Statements are generally considered to be nonactionable opinion when the facts supporting the opinion are disclosed.”

David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal book The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argued in a post about the journalistic principle of objectivity that “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.” In other words, when you have the ability to link to information that supports your conclusions, it’s easier to get away with being subjective, because readers are able to follow the links and decide for themselves whether you are credible.

I think the same principle applies to plagiarism: it is something that occurs when a medium doesn’t allow — or at least doesn’t encourage — links to original sources. The internet may make it more likely that someone copies content from another, but it also makes it easier to fix.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user skedonk

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

The Daily cites unidentified “multiple sources in the Seattle area” who say Amazon plans to launch three blogs: one “designed to compete in the tech news space with websites like Gizmodo and The Verge” that would be “populated with unbiased reviews that would link back to Amazon’s retail site,” one on “film, comics, TV and other geek-related activities” and one on “the emerging market of mobile phone photography apps.”

Amazon, which did not respond to my request for comment for this story, already has eight under-the-radar blogs: Books blog Omnivoracious, Kindle blog Daily Kindle Post, culinary blog Al Dente, cars blog Car Lust, movies blog Armchair Commentary, music blog ChordStrike and the aforementioned End User. Most of those appear to be updated somewhat regularly, but End User and ChordStrike haven’t published new posts since last year. The most recent post on End User was “Google debuts Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer,” on May 11, 2011.

So it’s not that unlikely that Amazon would launch its own tech blog: It’s done so before. It is fun to imagine Amazon publishing a “serious” tech blog, though — posting “unbiased” reviews of the Kindle and complaining about its own refusal to release sales figures. It’s also funny to imagine the tech blog world complaining, as the book publishing world has, that Amazon is competing with it and stealing away some of its brightest bloggers. Just think of the headlines: “Hey, Amazon: Traditional tech blogs aren’t dead.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user walkadog

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• Monetizing music in the post-scarcity age

A Spike in Search Warrants

A judge granted the first warrant to search an iPhone just months after the device was unveiled. In August of 2007, the Secret Service obtained permission to search Joseph Siddon’s phone after he was caught with dozens of fake ID’s at a Buffalo airport.

Since then, federal judges have granted many more warrants for investigations that range from bank scams to drug trafficking. The federal court system PACER shows 50 cases listing “iPhone” as the “defendant” but this number is likely higher and does not include state court cases.

The search requests have also become more frequent. While the record lists five warrants for 2009, this screenshot shows that number has been surpassed already this year:

Starting last year, federal agents began directing warrants at iPads as well. The first of these popped up in Wisconsin after an officer told a judge that ”An Apple 16 GB iPad which is in the care and custody of the DEA” was likely to contain evidence about an illegal sports betting ring.

Since then, there have been at least five other federal warrants aimed at iPads.

Smartphones and the police’s data-sucking vampire

The uptick in iWarrants reflects the simple fact that seizing a smartphone or tablet can be as valuable to authorities as grabbing a crook’s hard drive.

In many cases, the payload may be even greater. Police can get not only emails and browsers histories but a also plethora of social data from apps like Twitter and Facebook — much of which is permanently baked into the device.

As law student Amanda Brill explains in a recent paper, companies like Cellbrite provide police with forensic tools that can:

“[D]ump the entirety of your phone…all of your text messages, emails, videos, and photos – even the ones you deleted – Google Map queries…web searches, passwords, call logs…your phone’s entire file system.” This information is “all timestamped, all geotagged, all providing a digital recreation of the way your physical existence projects itself into the cellular ether.”

The passage quotes tech site Gizmodo which described Cellbrite as “The Handheld Dracula that Sucks your entire life from your phone.”

Brill says the forensic technology can be deployed not only in a crime lab but “in the field” as well.

Fading Privacy rights

The reason we have search warrants in the first place is to ensure that the police and government must go through someone — a judge — before they can get into your stuff in the first place. The warrants also draw strict lines around what can and can’t be searched: Your car but not your house, for example, or your home but not your computer.

From this perspective, the surge in i-related warrants is actually a good thing. It shows that Fourth Amendment protections still exist for the places where, in the courts’ words, we have “a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Unfortunately, those protections are not holding up so well in the bigger picture.

One big problem is a rule that lets police search without a warrant in the case of an arrest. This makes sense to ensure a suspect doesn’t have weapons or contraband but it is unclear why the exception should also let cops get into the contents of a smartphone. While some courts have put brakes on this practice, others have said it is fair game.

And in the cases where there is a warrant, courts are drawing no lines around which parts of the iPhone can be searched and which cannot. This is different from computer warrants which often set limits on what investigators can look for; police in a drug investigation, for example, might be able to search a hard drive for narcotics data but not for evidence of blackmail (unless there was probably cause for that too).

It may not make sense to allow police to search some parts of an iPhone but not others. But in age where our phones contain not just our own lives but those of our friends, it’s time to start redrawing some lines.

iPhone Search Warrant Example Copy

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Everett Collection].

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Criticism from bloggers and tech industry types aren’t Gizmodo’s only problems, however: on Friday, a police task force raided the home of editor Jason Chen and seized several computers and other belongings, carrying a warrant that they said authorized them to investigate a crime involving the sale of the iPhone prototype. In response, some — including Gawker Media COO Gaby Darbyshire, who is a lawyer, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — have argued that the police breached the so-called “journalist shield law” in California, which protects media outlets from search and seizure. On Monday evening, the district attorney’s office said that it was reviewing the case.

By buying the phone, some have argued that Gizmodo was simply practicing modern journalism, which for some tabloid outlets such as TMZ can involve paying sources for their stories. Gawker Media founder Nick Denton has said that he is happy to practice “checkbook journalism” in return for a good story, and that he is a “gossip merchant” who only accidentally engages in journalism. Others, including John Gruber of Daring Fireball, have maintained that Gizmodo was guilty of theft by buying a phone that the blog knew was not the lawful property of the person they bought it from.

What do you think? Was Gizmodo justified in paying someone for an iPhone prototype that they knew (or should have known) didn’t belong to the person they were buying it from? Or should they be subject to legal repercussions as a result of doing so?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user SD Kirk

Breaking Godwin’s Law at a sub-atomic level, incendiary Gizmodo cites an anonymous source describing how security finds leakers at Apple, not to mention creating a pervasive atmosphere of fear and dread, referencing “Nazi” tactics by the “Gestapo.” That is, if you believe it.

Reading like something by Fake Steve Jobs—only not nearly as entertaining—Jesus Diaz relays the experience of “Tom,” a supposed current or former employee of Apple. Tom alleges that Apple has “moles,” or informants, “working everywhere, especially in departments where leaks are suspected.” When a leak is strongly suspected, members of the Team Apple World Police “Apple Worldwide Loyalty” arrive and an “operation” takes place.

What’s described is effectively a lockdown. Employees are forced to remain at their desks. Their cellphones are collected, and anyone needing to contact the outside is monitored. Interviews are done. NDAs are signed. If security finds the suspected leaker, and “they usually do,” the person is fired after questioning. Of the questioning itself, “Tom” has no first-hand experience.

“There is a lot that goes behind doors that I don’t really know about. I do know, however, that they really interrogate people that are serious suspects, intimidating them by threatening to sue.”

Setting aside logical inconsistencies in the article like cameras being forbidden at Apple yet every employee having an iPhone, and legal questions such as confiscating personal cell phones, “Tom” asserts this type of corporate behavior is common at Apple. With 35,000 employees, it seems difficult to imagine that were such invasive tactics the norm, that it could be kept a secret, or at least made public by more than one guy through e-mail.

Looking at comments about Apple at GlassDoor.com, a website where employees can rate their employers, there’s not a lot of Nazi analogies…though from reading Gizmodo’s article you’d certainly think there should be. There are negative comments, but in aggregate the opinion is positive. In a recent survey, Apple scored 3.9 out of 5.0 for fifth place in the top 10 tech companies to work for. As CEO, Steve Jobs had an approval rating of 91 percent, highest on the list. In contrast, Dell was rated lowest among tech companies with a score of 2.8, while CEO Michael Dell’s approval rating was 28 percent.

If you are waiting for some purple prose about working Dell tech support hell in some warehouse outside of Mumbai, you’ll probably be disappointed. There’s no fame or fortune in stating the obvious.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• What Google’s Honeycomb Means for Apple and Microsoft