Anatomy of a Post - Attribution
Sunday, March 30th, 2008The currency of the Distributed Republic of Blogistan is the link. One link equals approximately $0.00. Even so, links aren’t worthless. There is no shame in getting links for your blog from other bloggers — indeed, one of the blogiverse’s finest characteristics is its ability to examine a single story from a thousand angles, wearing it as smooth as a riverstone as it is handled by a horde of self-appointed analysts.
So no blogger will complain that you are stealing from her if you reproduce her links on your site, but woe to the blogger who does so without attribution. If we find a link on your blog, we don’t need to ask your permission to post it on ours, but we’d be very rude indeed if we didn’t link back to your site. Attributing links establish the chain of authorship. They drive your readers to the sites that you read. They are the invaluable payback from one blogger to another, the indispensable, virtual high-five.
On Boing Boing, we attribute in two ways:
For suggestions sent by email, we add (Thanks, !) to the end of the post.
For items found elsewhere, we add (via ) to the end of the post.
Other blogs handle attribution in their own way. Some do it inline (”Found on Metafilter: Yet another domain hijacking”). Some do it very briefly, at the beginning or the end of the post (”Check out this amazing Flash animation. [slashdot]”, “Scripting News: More cease and desist letters from the Church of Scientology”).
By-LineBlogs are written by people, not PR departments or staff writers. Blog entries are almost always signed by their authors, even if the author uses a pseudonym. On Boing Boing, we link the by-lines to the author’s email address, so readers can respond personally to a story with one click. Some sites use feedback forms to avoid putting their email addresses on the Web where they can be harvested by spammers.
The by-line is part of the Internet personal publishing revolution. Before the rise of online publishing, the average person’s only chance to write something for public consumption that carried her name was a letter to the editor. The real world is thick with unattributed, seemingly authorless material — who wrote that Associated Press story on page two of your morning paper, or the newscast that you heard at the top of the hour? Who wrote the instructions that came with your VCR or the warning label on your gas cap? Blogs are covered with by-lines. Bloggers gleefully lay claim to their words and bear blame when those words arouse ire in their readers.