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Proper Attribution, or What’s Up With All This Via Crap?

I’ve written before that nothing’s original anymore, and there’s nothing new under the sun. This is triple-true for blogs, where it seems that 99% of the content out there is just the rehashing and relinking of stuff that someone else wrote somewhere else.

This is unavoidable, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing; even if you can’t achieve true originality, you can be a part of some broader digital consensus. Which is a polite way of admitting that you don’t have a chance at doing anything original, so you might as well go with the flow. (See also the phenomenon of hundreds of people taking essentially identical and poorly composed and executed photos of the same thing, simply because they want to have “their own” digital memory of the event.)

Anyway, if something inspires you to blog, you should always attribute it. Linking to a source is easy (usually), it’s polite, it shows you’re aware of what’s going on in the blogosphere and you know how to be a good participant. And all it takes is a simple acknowledgement, with a link back to the source. Easy, right? “Link via XYZ blog.”

Well, sometimes, doing the right thing isn’t as easy as that.

For starters, the nature of the blog commentariat and link economy being what it is, figuring out what the original source is (and best thing to link to) can be a pain. There have been times when I’ve seen an item on the social linksharing site Digg, that’s pointing to a gaming blog (say, Kotaku), which in turn got it from another gaming site (say, Joystiq), that picked it up from social linksharing site reddit, that finally got the original link of some random guy’s blog. (This is only a slight exaggeration, by the way.)

If you’re going to be honest in that example, you’ll want to say that you got the link via Digg, but if you want to be the most useful, the best resource is skipping directly to “Random Guy’s Blog.” (Even though the other two gaming blogs may have useful commentary, and Random Guy’s Blog is probably down, overloaded from all the traffic, anyway.)

Doing the whole “via” chain in this case (”link in Random Guy’s Blog via reddit via Joystiq via Kotaku via Digg”) is pretty silly; what I’ll typically do is say something like:

“Check out the original article in Random Guy’s Blog, [link via Digg]“

Since Digg was the way I became aware of it, I’ll give them the first credit, though the full chain of “via”s is available if the person wants to click his or her way through it.

Anyway, the point of all this is to be aware of the best link to highlight, which is not always the link by which you became aware of the issue.

Of course, you can avoid all this by writing about completely original stuff. As this may consist of knowledge exclusive only to you (e.g. what’s in your pocket, what you had for breakfast), you may need to branch out to items of broader interest, and thus, this whole racket.

Do you do your due diligence when you attribute a link? Or do you pick the first link in the chain and be done with it? Leave a comment and share how you handle attributing links.

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