Neighborly gossips in the Altstadt in Sindelfingen, Germany Gossip consists of casual or idle talk between friends. While ostensibly value neutral, the term often specifically refers to talk of scandal, slander, or schadenfreude relating to known associates of the participants, and discussed in an underhand or clandestine manner. Compare backbiting. While gossip forms one of the oldest and (still) the most common means of spreading and sharing facts and views, it also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information thus transmitted. The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted (usually) has a personal or trivial nature. Compare conversation. Some people commonly understand gossip as meaning the spreading of rumor and misinformation, as (for example) through excited discussion of scandals. Some newspapers carry "gossip columns" which retail the social and personal lives of celebrities or of élite members of certain communities. Gossip has recently come into the academy as a fruitful avenue of study, particularly in light of its relationship to both overt and implicit power structures. Compare discourse. Researchers studying computer networks and distributed computing have recently begun to develop software based on what they term gossip protocols. These mimic social networks as a way to carry out distributed computing tasks that can be hard to solve in other ways. (The term epidemic protocol is also used in this context.)