I first noticed this a month or so ago when I went to copy something from another blog to use as a quote. The copy went fine but when I pasted the section of text into the post that I was working there was suddenly a couple of blank lines and then this honkin’ huge assed link attached to what I had copied. The link had a nifty little message included telling the reader where the section of text had been copied from – like I was stealing it or something.

Look you idiots using this piece of crap service not only are you irritating the hell out of me by doing this (thereby making it less likely I will use you as a reference) but you are insinuating that I’m not intelligent enough to give proper attribution for your words.

Here’s a hint. Stop.It.

I understand that you might be a little upset with some doofuses out there who don’t honor this attribution thing that is pounded into the head of any decent blogger out there, but they are a minority. By using this service from some company called Tynt you are insulting those bloggers out there who do care about doing things the right way.

And if you think that I’m being a little over board on this well .. I’m not the only one who is feeling this way. both John Gruber from Daring Fireball and Mike Masnick from Techdirt have said much the same thing – albeit a little politer, but then I’m not in the mood to be polite about this.

As Gruber says in his post (see proper attribution at work):

It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.

Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the “copy/paste company” is a service that breaks copy and paste.

The pitch from Tynt to publishers is that their clipboard jiggery-pokery allows publishers to track where text copied from their website is being used, on the assumption that whoever is pasting the text is leaving the Tynt-inserted attribution URL, with its gibberish-looking tracking ID. This is, I believe, a dubious assumption. Who, when they paste such text and find this “Read more:” attribution line appended, doesn’t just delete it (and wonder how it got there)?

Mike was a lot calmer:

As someone who does a fair bit of copying and pasting in writing this blog, I agree with Gruber that this is a bit of a nuisance. It’s not a hugely annoying thing, but it is annoying. If I’m copying and pasting from your website, I know what your website is, and I am already planning to link back to it. Adding that superfluous text is just annoying and basically forcing my computer to do something I did not ask it to do.

This isn’t happening on just small blogs either that are doing this but rather big name blogs like Wired, SFGate, New Yorker and TechCrunch (which by the way though an error every time).

Quit hijacking my cut and paste is a post from: The Inquisitr

There’s no definite rule with attribution, but a debate about how to give attribution came up back in 2003/ 2004 back when I was editing The Blog Herald. I can’t remember all of the players but the debate was pretty wide spread at the time, and I’m pretty sure it included guys like Dave Winer and possibly Robert Scoble. The rough rules decided on then (by many) are what I’ve followed since; in part some of these may be overkill and sadly some are not followed today, but I’ve always considered this to be the fair way of doing things.

Primary source:
If the primary source for the post comes from another blog (an exclusive) a link is desirable in the first line. For example: zyz reports [link], or xyz fact according to a report at [link].

The negation to this rule: if you’ve been approached by the source directly (media release, tip, exclusive etc) or if multiple sites are reporting the facts having obtained the data the same way.

Via source:
It’s good form to include a via link in a post if you’ve obtained the story idea via another site or blog. Format: (via: [link]). This is one part of attribution that seems to be dying out. It’s unfortunate, because it was one of the features that helped build the blogosphere.

Quote/ Inline source:
Where the source isn’t primary (they are reporting it second hand, most commonly with MSM), you can quote the external site within the post as an alternative to a via link. This has become more common than a via link, but it’s really only desirable if you can make it work within the context of the post. I’ve always used with direct quoting: Format: [link] says/ reports “xyz.”

Photo credits:
These weren’t really discussed in the old days, but in an age of litigious copyright holders it’s always safer to give a photo credit when using non-default imagery (in particular photos). Format: photocredit: [link]. The other alternative is to use blog safe photos and I tend to use Wikimedia Commons.

The Honesty Catch:
There are times when blogs write about stories where other blogs have recently written about the same thing, without the second site knowing the first site wrote about it. I’ve had this happen a couple of times in the last 12 months, with people demanding attribution when I’ve sourced the idea usually from a direct email from the company/ startup or site. I don’t believe a link is due where the author honestly wasn’t aware of the earlier article, and lets face it, if you really looked hard enough you’d nearly always find something has been written about before.

However some sites sit on stories for a couple of days then re-run them without attribution. It’s hard to catch them at it, but I had a situation a couple of years back where a writer at WebProNews lifted a post I’d written and clearly took from my post. The proof was beyond clear: he used an extremely obscure word I’d used, so obscure that the word only had a couple of uses in Google and none in (for memory) prior 6-12 months. He denied it (weasels always do), but it was a cut and dry case. ParisLemon talks about another site with a similar modus operandi today.

I should probably turn this into a policy document for The Inquisitr, I’ve spoken to the writing staff about this roughly, and we might not always get it right (including me) but aiming to be a fair and decent neighbor in the blogosphere is something I believe tides this site, and anybody following these rules well. After all, it’s good karma to link out and link often, you’ll often find people will return the favor.

(image credit: EMBT)

Giving Attribution is a post from: The Inquisitr