Hi boys and girls.  How's it going?  For the last several weeks, I've been talking to you about making money with your blog.  And that's all fine and dandy, but I feel it's time to move on, at least for a little bit, into another area.  Commercial blogging isn't all about making money (really!), sometimes it's also about being a good member of the community.  So with this in mind, I'd like to spend a little time on attribution.

I'll start by telling you a little story.  The largest gadget blog in the world is arguably Engadget.com.  Some will disagree and grant the crown to Gizmodo.com, but whatever.  Three years ago, when I was still writing my own articles, I ran into a bit of a dispute with Peter Rojas of Engadget.  It was over the issue of attribution.  You see, early on, I used to spend an ungodly amount of time scouring the web for what I used to consider pretty unique content.  I'd read obscure sites, sometimes in languages I didn't understand and search hi and low for things that weren't already covered elsewhere.  And when I'd find something, I'd be pretty proud to write it up. 

Some sites would pick the article up on OhGizmo, and they'd write about it on theirs.  Gizmodo did it all the time, and the writers would give me credit for being the source (which brought in traffic, natch).  But not Engadget.  What Engadget used to do, actually, really upset me.  They'd write about the article... but credit someone else!  After all this hard work! 

So, I made a big stink about it at the time, and I was sure I was right.  I mean, hey!  Give me proper credit, you know? Our feud even got picked up by Digg.com, and was the talk of the town for about five hours.

Except that I was wrong.  Completely and utterly wrong, and it took me quite some time to figure it out.  It wasn't until OhGizmo grew to a certain size that I was able to see why.  You see, as an editor, you're faced with a dilemma (and I'm sure most of you have been there): when you find an interesting article, who do you credit?  Do you tell your readers where you found the info initially, without going any further?  Or do you do some research in an effort to find the originator of the news? 

I'm pretty sure that most people think it best to credit the originator of the story.  And that's a noble desire.  But the truth is, at the end of the day, it's almost impossible to do.  The nature of blogging makes it unrealistic to try and find the source.  And that's because people are constantly re-using other bloggers' info, passing it down from one blog to another, creating nearly endless daisy chains of data replication.  I'm sure some of you have seen it: "Via [this blog] Via [that blog] via [this other blog]" and so on ad nauseam. And then all it takes is for one link to be broken, for one blogger to omit the source, and your investigation comes to an end.  Is it reasonable to expect the editor to somehow keep searching, trying to unearth the elusive first?  I finally came to realize that it isn't. 

And that's why I had been wrong with Engadget.  Yeah, they weren't crediting me.  But that's just because they weren't reading me! They were simply giving credit to the blog on which they first found the info, and leaving it at that.  It's not their job to find out who talked about it first.  It's just their job to tell the reader where they found this first.

Maybe you think this is a small issue.  But it's not, at least when you get a certain amount of traffic.  While being far, far away from Engadget's levels of traffic, OhGizmo has grown to the point where it's a fairly regular occurrence to get an email from a frustrated blogger demanding proper credit for this or that story.  And the standard reply is a brief version of what I've just talked about.  And every now and then, that pisses people off.  And then I laugh at the irony.  That I was that dude, just a few years ago.

In any case, I'd be interested to hear what you guys do with attribution.

Posted by dponce80 at 02:34 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)