Attribution (citation) conventions and etiquette are well established in most written media. However, attribution etiquette seems to be far more relaxed – and sometimes non-existent – in the Blogosphere. David Starkoff, for instance, has complained in the past (perhaps somewhat jokingly) about the non-attribution of ideas originating in his blog that have later resurfaced in other parts of the Blogosphere. David himself could surely never be accused of non-attribution because his Inchoate blog probably has the highest concentration of links per sentence of any weblog I read.
One of the problems with blog attribution is deciding who to attribute. I may read a blog article that links to an idea in another blog. Do I attribute the conduit or the originator or both? What do you do in the case where a blog entry links to a non-blog resource? Do you acknowledge the referring blog entry (i.e. does it deserve some kudos/Google juice?), or do you just link directly to the non-blog resource?
The problem is exacerbated if one or more links in the chain are out-of-band; that is, outside the realm of the Blogosphere (e.g. e-mail or face-to-face conversation). I’m not sure that there is a solution to the problem (if it is a problem).
My own feeling is that the conduit and the originator ought to be linked in blog articles. On the one hand, this preserves the information trail and the social network, and on the other it allows readers to quickly jump to the originating source or the resource in question.
