Amber

Well, so you are pointing out an interesting element – the idea here is balancing storing the information compactly vs. presenting it clearly. The current RT syntax presents one or two of the people who helped bring you the information, but you are never entirely sure which of these would be the original creator.

The alternative, as I suggest, is to store that info compactly, but this is no longer all that human-readable, so at a quick glance, you can't determine who provided the info – you are reliant on your Twitter client to do that for you. However, the client could even display the whole chain of tweets that brought that info to you using the idea that I'm pitching.

Thanks for pointing out Jure Lesovec's work. For people who are interested, here is a link to Jure's MemeTracker experiment: http://memetracker.org/

Jure Leskovic recently had an interesting meme-tracking paper in SIGKDD (?) that tracked short phrases across the news media. I bet you could use their framework to track retweets as well. (It allows for some snipping and tweaking of the original content when it gets retweeted.)