I received an email this past weekend from someone, who I will keep anonymous, addressing the issue of plagiarism and our service at Listomi. In response I would like to post an open letter which I have sent this person because I believe it brings up an interesting point. The letter is below.

Hi,
First of all thank you for visiting Listomi.
I appreciate your feedback.

To answer your question, no, 100% of the content on Listomi.com is not
plagiarized.

Though it is an interesting question and I would like to take a moment to
explain to you the purpose of Listomi and what our goals are to hopefully
help you to understand what we are trying to accomplish.

What Listomi aims to be is a single, central repository of all possible
lists. For the purpose of our site I tend to think of lists in 2 main
categories, personal lists (eg. “My favorite movies”, “Things to do before
I die”) and factual lists (eg. “US States”, “Known bird species”). While
we have both of these on Listomi, our primary focus is on factual lists. A
factual list by definition should be based on facts and so will be finite
and absolute. Because of this there should technically only be one true
list. Again, the aim of Listomi is to collect and organize all of these
lists, many of which already exist in other places on the web. With the
increasingly vast amounts of information on the web I believe this service
will become quite valuable.

I hope this helps you understand that we are only trying to collect the
scattered information not only on the web but in any information
repository. We do not necessarily claim to be original authors of all
lists (eventually the majority of lists will be user generated), but
rather a service for collecting and organizing human knowledge.

Thanks again for your feedback and please let me know if you have any
other questions or complaints.

Regards,

—
Travis P. Walter
info@listomi.com
www.Listomi.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 12:07 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.