Month: February 2005

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.

Some fans of classic cinema might appreciate this commercial (requires Quicktime plugin) for the Volkswagen Golf GTI, while other fans might be horrified. I like it!

I’m still reading through The Commanding Heights. The pages have been turning over a little faster for the past few days. It’s been a fascinating read so far. Anyway, I came across this little passage in Chapter 9:

Perhaps nothing so much brought home the distance he [Mario Vargas Llosa] had traveled as when he encountered his old friend Gabriel García Márquez one evening at a theater in Mexico City. García Márquez had never abandoned Fidel Castro, and he was strongly critical of Vargas Llosa’s repudiation of the left. They got into an argument, and Vargas Llosa ended up knocking García Márquez out, which is something that one hardly ever gets to do to the subject of one’s doctoral dissertation.